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WIKIBOOKS
DISPONIBILI
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ARTICLES IN THE BOOK

  1. Adverbial
  2. Agentive ending
  3. Ain't
  4. American and British English differences
  5. American and British English pronunciation differences
  6. American and British English spelling differences
  7. American English
  8. Amn't
  9. Anglophone
  10. Anglosphere
  11. Apostrophe
  12. Australian English
  13. Benjamin Franklin's phonetic alphabet
  14. Bracket
  15. British and American keyboards
  16. British English
  17. Canadian English
  18. Certificate of Proficiency in English
  19. Classical compound
  20. Cockney
  21. Colon
  22. Comma
  23. Comma splice
  24. Cut Spelling
  25. Dangling modifier
  26. Dash
  27. Definite article reduction
  28. Disputed English grammar
  29. Don't-leveling
  30. Double copula
  31. Double negative
  32. Ellipsis
  33. English alphabet
  34. English compound
  35. English declension
  36. English English
  37. English grammar
  38. English honorifics
  39. English irregular verbs
  40. English language learning and teaching
  41. English modal auxiliary verb
  42. English orthography
  43. English passive voice
  44. English personal pronouns
  45. English phonology
  46. English plural
  47. English relative clauses
  48. English spelling reform
  49. English verbs
  50. English words with uncommon properties
  51. Estuary English
  52. Exclamation mark
  53. Foreign language influences in English
  54. Full stop
  55. Generic you
  56. Germanic strong verb
  57. Gerund
  58. Going-to future
  59. Grammatical tense
  60. Great Vowel Shift
  61. Guillemets
  62. Habitual be
  63. History of linguistic prescription in English
  64. History of the English language
  65. Hyphen
  66. I before e except after c
  67. IELTS
  68. Initial-stress-derived noun
  69. International Phonetic Alphabet for English
  70. Interpunct
  71. IPA chart for English
  72. It's me
  73. Languages of the United Kingdom
  74. Like
  75. List of animal adjectives
  76. List of British idioms
  77. List of British words not widely used in the United States
  78. List of case-sensitive English words
  79. List of commonly confused homonyms
  80. List of common misspellings in English
  81. List of common words that have two opposite senses
  82. List of dialects of the English language
  83. List of English apocopations
  84. List of English auxiliary verbs
  85. List of English homographs
  86. List of English irregular verbs
  87. List of English prepositions
  88. List of English suffixes
  89. List of English words invented by Shakespeare
  90. List of English words of Celtic origin
  91. List of English words of Italian origin
  92. List of English words with disputed usage
  93. List of frequently misused English words
  94. List of Fumblerules
  95. List of homophones
  96. List of -meters
  97. List of names in English with non-intuitive pronunciations
  98. List of words having different meanings in British and American English
  99. List of words of disputed pronunciation
  100. London slang
  101. Longest word in English
  102. Middle English
  103. Modern English
  104. Names of numbers in English
  105. New Zealand English
  106. Northern subject rule
  107. Not!
  108. NuEnglish
  109. Oxford spelling
  110. Personal pronoun
  111. Phonological history of the English language
  112. Phrasal verb
  113. Plural of virus
  114. Possessive adjective
  115. Possessive antecedent
  116. Possessive me
  117. Possessive of Jesus
  118. Possessive pronoun
  119. Preposition stranding
  120. Pronunciation of English th
  121. Proper adjective
  122. Question mark
  123. Quotation mark
  124. Received Pronunciation
  125. Regional accents of English speakers
  126. Rhyming slang
  127. Run-on sentence
  128. Scouse
  129. Semicolon
  130. Semordnilap
  131. Serial comma
  132. Shall and will
  133. Silent E
  134. Singular they
  135. Slash
  136. SoundSpel
  137. Space
  138. Spelling reform
  139. Split infinitive
  140. Subjective me
  141. Suffix morpheme
  142. Tag question
  143. Than
  144. The Reverend
  145. Third person agreement leveling
  146. Thou
  147. TOEFL
  148. TOEIC
  149. Truespel
  150. University of Cambridge ESOL examination
  151. Weak form and strong form
  152. Welsh English
  153. Who
  154. You

 

 
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THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
This article is from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_passive_voice

All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License 

English passive voice

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

In English as in many other languages, the passive voice is the form of a transitive verb whose grammatical subject serves as the patient, receiving the action of the verb. The passive voice is typically contrasted with the active voice, which is the form of a transitive verb whose subject serves as the agent, performing the action of the verb. The subject of a verb in the passive voice corresponds to the object of the same verb in the active voice. English's passive voice is periphrastic; that is, it does not have a one-word form. Rather, it is formed using a form of the auxiliary verb be together with a verb's past participle.

The canonical passive

Passive constructions have a range of meanings and uses. The canonical use to map a clause with a direct object to a corresponding clause where the direct object has become the subject. For example, consider the following sentence:

  • John threw the ball.

Here, threw is a transitive verb with John as its subject and the ball as its direct object. If we recast the verb in the passive voice (was thrown), then the ball becomes the subject (it is promoted to the subject position) and John disappears:

  • The ball was thrown.

The original subject can typically be re-inserted using the preposition by:

  • The ball was thrown by John.

Promotion of other objects

One non-canonical use of English's passive is to promote an object other than a direct object. It is usually possible in English to promote indirect objects as well. For example, consider the following:

  • John gave Mary a book. → Mary was given a book.

In the active form, gave is the verb; John is its subject, Mary its indirect object, and a book its direct object; in the passive form, the indirect object has been promoted and the direct object has been left in place.

It is also possible, in some cases, to promote the object of a preposition:

  • They talked about the problem. → The problem was talked about.

(See also Preposition stranding.)

Promotion of content clauses

It is possible to promote a content clause that serves as a direct object. In this case, however, it typically does not change its position in the sentence, and an expletive it takes the normal subject position:

  • They say that he left. → It is said that he left.

Stative passives

The passives described so far have all been eventive (or dynamic) passives. There exist also stative (or static, or resultative) passives; rather than describing an action, they describe the result of an action. English does not usually distinguish between the two. For example, consider the following sentence:

  • The door was locked.

This sentence has two meanings, roughly the following:

  • [Someone] locked the door.
  • The door was in the locked state. (Presumably, someone had locked it.)

The former meaning represents the canonical, eventive passive; the latter, the stative passive. (The terms eventive and stative/resultative refer to the tendencies of these forms to describe events and resultant states, respectively. The terms can be misleading, however, as the canonical passive of a stative verb is not a stative passive, even though it describes a state.)

Some verbs do not form stative passives. In some cases, this is because distinct adjectives exist for this purpose, such as with the verb open:

  • The door was opened. → [Someone] opened the door.
  • The door was open. → The door was in the open state.

Adjectival passives

Adjectival passives are not true passives; they occur when a participial adjective (an adjective derived from a participle) is used predicatively (see Adjective). For example:

  • She was relieved to find her car undamaged.

Here, relieved is an ordinary adjective, though it derives from the past participle of relieve.[1]

In some cases, the line between an adjectival passive and a stative passive may be unclear.

Passives without active counterparts

In a few cases, passive constructions retain all the sense of the passive voice, but do not have immediate active counterparts. For example:

  • He was rumored to be a war veteran. ← *[Someone] rumored him to be a war veteran.

(The asterisk here denotes an ungrammatical construction.) Similarly:

  • It was rumored that he was a war veteran. ← *[Someone] rumored that he was a war veteran.

In both of these examples, the active counterpart was once possible, but has fallen out of use.

Double passives

It is possible for a verb in the passive voice — especially an object-raising verb — to take an infinitive complement that is also in the passive voice:

  • The project is expected to be completed in the next year.

Commonly, either or both verbs may be moved into the active voice:

  • [Someone] expects the project to be completed in the next year.
  • [Someone] is expected to complete the project in the next year.
  • [Someone] expects [someone] to complete the project in the next year.

In some cases, a similar construction may occur with a verb that is not object-raising in the active voice:

  • ?The project will be attempted to be completed in the next year. ← *[Someone] will attempt the project to be completed in the next year. ← [Someone] will attempt to complete the project in the next year.

(The question mark here denotes a questionably-grammatical construction.) In this example, the object of the infinitive has been promoted to the subject of the main verb, and both the infinitive and the main verb have been moved to the passive voice. The American Heritage Book of English Usage declares this unacceptable,[2] but it is nonetheless attested in a variety of contexts.[3]

Other passive constructions

Past participle alone

A past participle alone usually carries passive force; the form of be can therefore be omitted in certain circumstances, such as newspaper headlines and reduced relative clauses:

  • Couple found slain; Murder-suicide suspected. [1]
  • The problem, unless dealt with, will only get worse.
  • A person struck by lightning has a high chance of survival.

With get as the auxiliary

While the ordinary passive construction uses the auxiliary be, the same effect can sometimes be achieved using get in its place:

  • Jamie got hit with the ball.

This use of get is fairly restricted. First of all, it is fairly colloquial; be is used in news reports, formal writing, and so on. Second of all, it typically only forms eventive passives of eventive verbs. Third of all, it is most often (but not necessarily) used with semantically negative verbs; for example, the phrase get shot is much more common than the phrase get praised.

Ergative verbs

Main article: Ergative verb

An ergative verb is a verb that may be either transitive or intransitive, and whose subject when it is intransitive plays the same semantic role as its direct object when it is transitive. For example, fly is an ergative verb, such that the following sentences are roughly synonymous:

  • The airplane flew.
  • The airplane was flown.
  • [Someone] flew the airplane.

One major difference is that the intransitive construction does not permit an agent to be mentioned, and indeed can imply that no agent is present, that the subject is performing the action on itself. For this reason, the intransitive construction of an intransitive verb is often said to be in a middle voice, between active and passive, or in a mediopassive voice, between active and passive but closer to passive.

Reflexive verbs

A reflexive verb is a transitive verb one of whose objects is a reflexive pronoun (myself, yourself, etc.) referring back to its subject. In some languages, reflexive verbs are a special class of verbs with special semantics and syntax, but in English, they typically represent ordinary uses of transitive verbs. For example, with the verb see:

  • He sees her as a writer.
  • She sees herself as a writer.

Nonetheless, sometimes English reflexive verbs have a passive sense, expressing an agentless action. Consider the verb solve, as in the following sentences:

  • He solved the problem.
  • The problem solved itself.

One could not say that the problem truly solved anything; rather, what is meant is that the problem was solved without anyone solving it.

Gerunds and nominalization

Gerunds and nominalized verbs (nouns derived from verbs and referring to the actions or states expressed by them), unlike finite verbs, do not require explicit subjects. This allows an object to be expressed while omitting a subject. For example:

  • The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
  • Generating electricity typically requires a magnet and a solenoid.

Criticisms

Many usage guides and teachers of English discourage the use or overuse of the passive voice because it is believed to obscure the agent or to create unnecessary ambiguity[4].

The passive voice may be vague, or it may obscure the cause but not the effect:

  • Mistakes were made. (passive voice)
  • I made mistakes. (active voice)

But this "bureaucratic passive" usage may be very effective when a writer/speaker intentionally wishes to avoid mentioning the party responsible for (or affected by) an untoward occurrence:

  • Taxes were raised.
  • Difficulties were encountered.

In other cases, the passive voice is less awkward and the active voice would rarely be used, possibly because the agent is implied:

  • He was born on August 1. (passive voice)

rather than:

  • His mother bore him on August 1. (active voice)

Sometimes, the passive voice is preferable because a writer wishes to place or maintain emphasis on the patient of the action, not for purposes of deception or concealment, but simply as a matter of style. In such cases, the agent may also be obvious, or explicitly supplied with a by X construction later on.

  • A foul ball hit the umpire. (active voice)
  • The umpire was hit by a foul ball. (passive voice)

In related cases, the passive may be used to maintain better "old/new information flow:" i.e., if the patient is known from previous context, but the agent (etc.) is new information. Compare the following:

  • Another highly valuable precious metal is gold. People first discovered this metal in prehistoric times. (active voice)
  • Another highly valuable precious metal is gold. This metal was first discovered in prehistoric times. (passive voice)

Some people would consider the second pair of sentences to flow better, since this metal, referring to gold (i.e., the old information in the second sentence), appears closer to the front of the sentence, more logically connecting it with the previous context and easing the transition to all the newer information about gold, which comes afterward.

The passive voice may be more effective where the agent is unimportant, and where the passive construction allows the use of an everyday Anglo Saxon word rather than a Latinate one:

  • She was given a book

rather than

  • She received a book.

The passive voice is still commonly used in formal and business communications. Particularly in journalistic writing, science writing, and law, the passive voice is often considered normal, rather than a sign of deception. Similarly, in scientific writing it is sometimes more convenient to use the passive voice with an implied agent, for example: "The error was found to result from contamination" instead of "We found the error to result from contamination." However, contemporary scientific writing is increasingly using the active voice, usually with we as the subject. There is also a trend to reduce the use of the passive voice in law, particularly in documents meant for public consumption, such as software licenses. Journalism schools currently teach to avoid passive voice whenever possible, to the point where each sentence in passive voice can earn students a drop in one letter grade for an assignment.

Notes

  1. ^ Language Log: How to defend yourself from bad advice about writing
  2. ^ The American Heritage Book of English Usage, ch. 1, sect. 24 "double passive." Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996. http://www.bartleby.com/64/C001/024.html. Accessed 13 November 2006.
  3. ^ "Double Your Passive, Double Your Fun," from Literalminded. http://literalminded.wordpress.com/2005/05/16/double-your-passive-double-your-fun/. Accessed 13 November 2006.
  4. ^ See for example The Elements of Style.
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