The passive marker bei has been the subject of a significant quantity of linguistic research; however the bulk of studies to date have focussed on its use in written Chinese. This article provides a snap shot of current usage of bei in spoken Mandarin based on a corpus of Chinese chat show transcripts and assesses the claims made about the bei construction in the literature. Careful examination of the data reveals that this grammatical marker is both less sensitive to a number of constraints outlined in the mainstream literature and, at the same time, more responsive to a range of different contextual factors, some of which seem to have been overlooked in previous treatments of Mandarin grammar. In particular, it is found that many non-grammatical factors play a role in determining the behaviour of the passive marker bei. The analysis demonstrates that spoken data can reveal interesting insights in to the complexity of the grammatical system, insights that may possibly not be so readily apparent on the basis of written texts and grammaticality judgments alone. This suggests that other morpho-syntactic features of Modern Standard Chinese could likewise benefit from a detailed analysis of their behaviour in spoken interactions.

中文翻译：

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汉语口语中被动标记bei的使用

被动标记 bei 已成为大量语言研究的主题。然而，迄今为止的大部分研究都集中在它在书面中文中的使用上。本文根据中文聊天节目的语料库提供了当前在普通话中使用 bei 的快照，并评估了文献中关于 bei 结构的说法。对数据的仔细检查表明，这种语法标记对主流文献中概述的一些限制不太敏感，同时对一系列不同的上下文因素更敏感，其中一些似乎被忽略了以前的普通话语法处理。特别是，发现许多非语法因素在决定被动标记bei的行为中起作用。分析表明，口语数据可以揭示对语法系统复杂性的有趣见解，这些见解可能不会仅仅基于书面文本和语法判断而显而易见。这表明现代标准汉语的其他形态句法特征同样可以受益于对他们在口语互动中的行为的详细分析。