On the 'passive' construction in Mandarin

In both traditional grammars and more recent analyses of Mandarin, sentences containing bèi have always been treated as passives. It is generally agreed that the bèi construction indicates that the patient is adversely affected (Li and Thompson (1981) and Lin (1981)). In addition, there are sentences without bèi that are said to indicate a nonadverse passive. In this paper, I will argue that bèi is not a passive marker, but rather an adversity marker. I will show that there is no syntactic passive in Mandarin. The so-called bèi-less passives are simply sentences with unaccusative, or ergative, verbs (Perlmutter 1978, Burzio 1986)