Chinese passive constructions in environmental discourse: A corpus-assisted functional study from an ecolinguistic perspective

The passive voice has long attracted linguistic interest, yet in Chinese most studies have focused on syntactic or semantic aspects, while discourse-oriented analyses remain scarce. This study adopts a functional-constructionist approach to investigate passive constructions (i.e., bèi-, zāo-, dédào-, huòdé-, shòu- and notional passives) in Chinese environmental discourse, a politically and ideologically sensitive domain. Drawing on the tailor-made Chinese Corpus of Environmental Discourse, covering four genres, and comparing it with the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese, the analysis combines quantitative and qualitative methods. Findings reveal that passive constructions perform a wide range of discourse functions, from vulnerabilizing patients, mitigating environmental crisis, to legitimizing institutional actions, presenting ideologically motivated content as factual, and embedding normative or evaluative stances. Overall, they emerge as powerful devices for patient perspectivization, projecting varying degrees and forms of subjectivity in ways that align with collective values of ecological responsibility.