Appearance of the Passive in Written Persian

Comparison with Japanese, English and French

Abstract

This paper offers a case study drawing from two sources of written language with different styles: literature and legal contracts. By comparing the use of the passive in Japanese, Persian, English and French, this paper identifies distinctive features of the Persian passive, an area that has not been thoroughly analyzed to date.

To what degree is the passive actually used in Persian, and in what forms does it appear? This paper elucidates these points and, in addition, compares Persian with the three other languages to achieve a more multifaceted analysis.

A comparison of typical usage of the passive in each language led to the following conclusions:

1) The rate of appearance of the passive does not differ greatly between literature and legal contracts.

2) The passive appears extremely infrequently in Persian legal contracts compared to the other languages.

3) Similarly to the case of Japanese, appearances of the passive in Persian literature were less than half that of their English and French counterparts.

A possible explanation is that the difference in writing style between the languages causes the difference in the syntax used. In the case of Japanese, where unpaired transitive verbs appear frequently in legal contracts, verbs are forced to take the passive form as substituting intransitive verbs when no performer of an action is specified. In Persian, on the other hand, peripheral syntax is frequently used in a semantic aspect rather than the typical passive form. Thus, when looking at sentences with typical syntax, the passive appears less frequently than it does in the other languages besides Japanese.