A Comparison Study on the Passives Used by Natives Based on BNC Corpus

With the development of computer science, corpus linguistics emerges as the times require. Since 1980 s, scholars at home and abroad have been committed to the construction and exploration of corpus, and have started a new era of corpus. Corpus can be seen as a storehouse to deposit the linguistic materials. It is a database, a scientifically organized collection of linguistic materials. In the language application, those linguistic materials can be both written and oral, are produced in a natural way. These raw materials are used to observe and grasp language facts, which are regarded as the first-hand data for the analysis and research of language rules. In this study, the author intends to achieve two main aims. The first is to investigate whether there are some differences in using the passives by native speakers when they write and speak, and whether such differences are statistically significant. The second is to investigate whether there are some differences in using the passives in native speakers' formal writings and informal writings, and whether such differences are statistically significant.