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Notwithstanding extensive studies on the passive construction across languages of the
world, there seems to be little agreement among scholars on the issue of the function of
the passive. For example, Givón (1981:168) claims that passive serves three functions:
(i) to assign of topic status to a non-agent, (ii) to suppress the agent and (iii)
de-transitivization of the verb form. Shibatani (1985:830), admitting that the
afore- mentioned three functions motivate passive clauses, argues “agent defocusing” to
be the primary function of the passives. Kuno & Kaburaki (1977) conceive passives as
reflection of “empathy” while experts on Chinese grammar like Li & Thompson (1981)
identify “adversity” as a primary function of the Chinese passive and claim that the
same traits are observed in other East and South-East Asian languages like Japanese,
Thai, and Vietnamese.

Against the backdrop of the mosaic of such differing as well as complementary
claims on the function of passives we undertook a cross- linguistic parallel corpora
analysis of the passive constructions in languages like Japanese, Korean, Chinese,
English and Marathi to adjudge the validity of the foregoing diverse claims and shed
some new light on this conundrum. We used two Japanese novels—KOKORO and
TOTTOCHAN—and their translated version in Korean, English and Marathi in the case
of KOKORO and Korean, Chinese, English and Marathi versions in the case of
TOTTOCHAN as the source of our data. Both the stories are a first person narration
chosen purposely to assess the effect of the so-called “empathy hierarchy” proposed by
Kuno & Kaburaki (1977). We identified the passives in the Japanese original first and
compared them with their counterparts in respective languages. The token frequency
counts attested in each language are tabulated below.

Table 1: KOKORO

Japanese	English	Korean	Marathi
339	164	102	42

Table 2: TOTTOCHAN

Japanese	English	Korean	Chinese	Marathi
79	41/78	39/77	29/77	6/70

A close scrutiny of the data reveals that “agent defocusing” is an omnipresent function
shared across languages under discussion as envisaged by Shibatani (1985) while other
functions proposed by various scholars seem to vary from one language to other or in
other words are language-specific. Thompson (1994) voices similar views in his
cross-linguistic study on passive and inverse constructions.

Languages differ significantly in the domain of empathy loaded or perspective
sensitive passives. Out of the total tokens of the passive in Japanese a third can be
ascribed to empathy effect involving the speaker/narrator as the goal/patient. In
Japanese it is almost obligatory to use passive when the speaker/narrator or the
members of his in-group are goal/patient of the state of affairs in question. Other
languages at hand vary on this count considerably suggesting thereby that the empathy
hierarchy cannot serve as a universal yardstick. This cross- linguistic contrast is arguably
attributable to the higher degree of sensitivity of Japanese language to speaker’s
subjective viewpoint/perspective or "subjectivity" which has been observed in other
domains of Japanese grammar as well (see Uehara 2001, Shibatani 2003, Uehara (To
appear)). In contrast, other languages sampled appear to show lesser degrees of
sensitivity to "subjectivity". Japanese and other East and South East Asian languages
rank higher than the South Asian languages on the subjectivity cline. Similar results
were found in our questionnaire-based study of the passives involving the speaker as the
patient/theme spanning over languages like English, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Thai,
Vietnamese, Khmer, Hindi, Marathi, Nepali and Bengali as well.

In sum, the notion of "subjectivity" holds the key to unravel the differences in
function of the passive in South Asian, South East Asian and East Asian languages.

Selected references

Brown, P. & S. Levinson. 1987. Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Givón, T. 1981. Typology and functional domains. Studies in Language 5.2: 163-193.

Kuno, S. & E. Kaburaki. 1977. Empathy and Syntax. Linguistic Inquiry 8.4: 627-672.

Shibatani, M. 1985. Passive and related constructions: A prototype analysis. Language
61.4: 821-848.

Shibatani, M. 2003. Directional verbs in Japanese. In Shay E. and U. Seibert (eds.)
Motion, direction and location in language: in honor of Zygmunt Frajzyngier.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 259-286.

Uehara, Satoshi. 2001. Anaphoric Pronouns and Perspective in Japanese: A Text-based
Analysis. In Cognitive-Functional Linguistics in an East Asian context.

Tokyo : Kuroshio publishers, 35-53.

Uehara, S. To appear. Typologizing linguistic subjectivity: A Cognitive and
cross-linguistic approach to grammaticalized deixis. In Angeliki Athanasiadou,
Constas Canakis and Bert Cornillie (eds.) Subjectification: Various Paths to
Subjectivity. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Masuoka, T. 1991. Zyudoohyoogen to syukansei (Passive and subjectivity). In Nitta, Y.
(ed.) Nihongono boisu to tadoosei (Voice and transitivity in Japanese). Tokyo:
Kurosio. 105-121.