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被,让,叫 differences in the passive?

  Tags: Grammar | Mandarin
 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages Post Reply
Duke100782
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Philippines
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Speaks: English*, Tagalog*
Studies: Spanish, Mandarin

 
 Message 1 of 3
26 January 2014 at 6:02am | IP Logged 
How are 被,让 and 叫 used in passive 被 sentences? I can't distinguish the usage and connotations of
each of them.

In my textbook, I have these examples:
刚才我被一辆三轮车到了。
钱包叫小偷偷走了。
我的录音机就是让他修好了。

I hope someone can help me out with the nuances between these three words.
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vermillon
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Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin
Studies: Japanese, German

 
 Message 2 of 3
28 January 2014 at 8:34am | IP Logged 
They're "more or less" interchangeable. Generally speaking, I would say that you should use 被 (the most common) and be able to recognize the two others.

Also worth nothing, 被 is the only one that can express passive voice without mention of the agent (我的钱包被偷了), the other two must specify it.

And since 叫 and 让 are also used in the active voice to mean "to make sb do sth", it can be a bit confusing at times.
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michaelyus
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Speaks: Mandarin, English*
Studies: Italian, French, Cantonese, Korean, Catalan, Vietnamese, Lingala, Spanish
Studies: Hokkien

 
 Message 3 of 3
28 January 2014 at 1:04pm | IP Logged 
被 is often used when the connotation is "adversative" i.e. the person has "suffered"
the action. It is rarely used in a positive sense (e.g. 被称赞 sounds really weird to
me). It sounds pretty formal in a neutral sense, although it is fairly common (e.g. 被
委任成).

The other passive markers are colloquial. They may also be "adversative" or "helpless"
in connotation. Again, use in positive sense would be rather weird (I think with a
colloquial nature, it might express the speaker's mild disapproval, although that's my
own impression).

In general, if you can avoid a syntactic, "marked" passive in Chinese, you should. Good
use of topic-comment structures help greatly.

Has that first sentence been copied correctly?
第一个句子写得对吗?(no passive marker, unlike English)
[Serious question]



Edited by michaelyus on 28 January 2014 at 1:10pm



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