Passive voice

This article is about the passive voice generally. For the passive voice in English, see English passive voice.

Passive voice is a grammatical voice common in many languages. In a clause with passive voice, the grammatical subject expresses the theme or patient of the main verb – that is, the person or thing that undergoes the action or has its state changed.[1] This contrasts with active voice, in which the subject has the agent role. For example, in the passive sentence "The tree was pulled down", the subject (the tree) denotes the patient rather than the agent of the action. In contrast, the sentences "Someone pulled down the tree" and "The tree is down" are active sentences.

Typically, in passive clauses, what is usually expressed by the object (or sometimes another argument) of the verb is now expressed by the subject, while what is usually expressed by the subject is either deleted, or is indicated by some adjunct of the clause. Thus, turning an active verb into a passive verb is a valence-decreasing process ("detransitivizing process"), because it turns transitive verbs into intransitive verbs.[2] This is not always the case; for example in Japanese a passive-voice construction does not necessarily decrease valence.[3]

Many languages have both an active and a passive voice; this allows for greater flexibility in sentence construction, as either the semantic agent or patient may take the syntactic role of subject.[4] The use of passive voice allows speakers to organize stretches of discourse by placing figures other than the agent in subject position. This may be done to foreground the patient, recipient, or other thematic role;[4] it may also be useful when the semantic patient is the topic of on-going discussion.[5] The passive voice may also be used to avoid specifying the agent of an action.

Passive marking

Different languages use various grammatical forms to indicate passive voice.

In some languages, passive voice is indicated by verb conjugation, specific forms of the verb. Examples of languages that indicate voice through conjugation include Latin and North Germanic languages such as Swedish.

Latin Swedish meaning
Vīnum ā servō portātur. Vinet bärs av tjänaren. "The wine is carried by the servant." (passive voice)
Servus vīnum portat. Tjänaren bär vinet. "The servant carries the wine." (active voice)

In Latin, the agent of a passive sentence (if indicated) is expressed using a noun in the ablative case, in this case servō (the ablative of servus). Different languages use different methods for expressing the agent in passive clauses. In Swedish, the agent can be expressed by means of a prepositional phrase with the preposition av (equivalent here to the English "by").

The Austronesian language Kimaragang Dusun also indicates passive voice by verb conjugation using the infix, -in-.[2]

root past passive meaning
patay pinatay "was killed"
nakaw ninakaw "was stolen"
garas ginaras "was butchered"

Other languages, including English, express the passive voice periphrastically, using an auxiliary verb.

In English

Main article: English passive voice

English, like some other languages, uses a periphrastic passive. Rather than conjugating directly for voice, English uses the past participle form of the verb plus an auxiliary verb, either be or get, to indicate passive voice.

If the agent is mentioned, it usually appears in a prepositional phrase introduced by the preposition by.

The subject of the passive voice usually corresponds to the direct object of the corresponding active voice (as in the above examples), but English also allows passive constructions in which the subject corresponds to an indirect object or preposition complement:

In sentences of the second type, a stranded preposition is left. This is called the prepositional passive or pseudo-passive (although the latter term can also be used with other meanings).

The active voice is the dominant voice used in English. Many commentators, notably George Orwell in his essay "Politics and the English Language" and Strunk & White in The Elements of Style, have urged minimizing use of the passive voice. However, the passive voice has important uses, and virtually all writers use passive voice, including Orwell and Strunk & White themselves.[6] There is general agreement that the passive voice is useful for emphasis, or when the receiver of the action is more important than the actor.[7]

Defining "passive"

In the field of linguistics, the term passive is applied to a wide range of grammatical structures. Linguists therefore find it difficult to define the term in a way that makes sense across all human languages. The canonical passive in European languages has the following properties:

  1. The subject is not an agent.
  2. There is a change in word order or in nominal morphology, the form of the nouns in the sentence.
  3. There is specific verbal morphology; a particular form of the verb indicates passive voice.

The problem arises with non-European languages. Many constructions in these languages share at least one property with the canonical European passive, but not all. While it seems justified to call these constructions passive when comparing them to European languages' passive constructions, as a whole the passives of the world's languages do not share a single common feature.[8]

R. M. W. Dixon has defined four criteria for determining whether a construction is a passive:[9]

  1. It applies to underlying transitive clauses and forms a derived intransitive.
  2. The entity that is the patient or the object of the transitive verb in the underlying representation (indicated as O in linguistic terminology) becomes the core argument of the clause (indicated as S, since the core argument is the subject of an intransitive).
  3. The agent in the underlying representation (indicated as A) becomes a chômeur, a noun in the periphery that is not a core argument. It is marked by a non-core case or becomes part of an adpositional phrase, etc. This can be omitted, but there's always the option of including it.
  4. There is some explicit marking of the construction.

Dixon acknowledges that this excludes some constructions labeled as passive by some linguists.[9]

Adversative passive

Some languages, including several Southeast Asian languages, use a form of passive voice to indicate that an action or event was unpleasant or undesirable.[2] This so-called adversative passive works like the ordinary passive voice in terms of syntactic structure—that is, a theme or instrument acts as subject. In addition, the construction indicates adversative affect, suggesting that someone was negatively affected.

In Japanese, for example, the adversative passive (also called indirect passive) indicates adversative affect. The indirect or adversative passive has the same form as the direct passive. Unlike the direct passive, the indirect passive may be used with intransitive verbs.[10]

Hanako-ga tonari-no gakusei-ni piano-o asa-made hika-re-ta.
Hanako-NOM neighbor-GEN student-DAT piano-ACC morning-until played-PASS-PFV
"Hanako was adversely affected by the neighboring student playing the piano until morning."[10]

Yup'ik, from the Eskimo-Aleut family, has two different suffixes that can indicate passive, -cir- and -ma-. The morpheme -cir- has an adversative meaning. If an agent is included in a passive sentence with the -cir passive, the noun is usually in the allative (oblique) case.[11]

neqerrluk yukucirtuq
neqe-rrluk yuku-cir-tu-q
fish-departed.from.natural.state be.moldy-get-indicative.intransitive-3sg
That beautiful piece of dry fish got moldy.[11]

Stative and dynamic passive

See also English passive voice: Stative and adjectival uses

In languages such as English, there is often a similarity between passive clauses expressing an action or event, and clauses expressing a state. For example, the string of words The dog is fed can represent two different meanings.

  1. The dog is fed (every day at 6:00).
  2. The dog is fed (for now).

In the first sentence the auxiliary verb is and the past participle fed combine to express the passive voice. In the second sentence is serves as an ordinary copula and the past participle as an adjective.

Sentences of the second type are sometimes confused with the passive voice, and in some treatments are considered to be a type of passive – a stative or static passive, in contrast to the dynamic or eventive passive exemplified by the first sentence. The stative type may also be called false passive. Some languages express or can express these meanings in contrasting ways.

The difference between dynamic and stative passives is more clear in languages such as German that use different words or constructions for the two.[12] In German, the auxiliary verb sein marks static passive (German: Zustandspassiv, rarely statisches Passiv, regarding German also sein-Passiv or Sein-Passiv), while werden marks the dynamic passive (Vorgangspassiv or Handlungspassiv, rarely dynamisches Passiv, regarding Germa also werden-Passiv or Werden-Passiv, and also simply called Passiv or Passivum).[13]

Der Rasen ist gemäht ("The lawn has been mown", literally "The lawn is mown", static)
Der Rasen wird gerade/oft gemäht ("The lawn is being mown right now" / "The lawn is mown often", literally "The lawn becomes mown right now / often", dynamic)

A number of German verbs such as bedecken ("cover"), erfüllen ("fill"), and trennen ("separate"), when used as stative verbs, only form static passives.

Schnee bedeckt die Erde ("Snow covers the earth", active)
Die Erde ist von Schnee bedeckt ("The earth is covered in snow", static)
but not: *Die Erde wird von Schnee bedeckt (dynamic)[14]

In English, the passive voice expressed with the auxiliary verb get rather than be ("get-passive") tends to express a dynamic rather than a static meaning. When the auxiliary verb be is used, the main verb can have either a dynamic or static meaning.

The couple got married last spring. (dynamic)
The marriage was celebrated last spring. (dynamic)
It is agreed that laws were invented for the safety of citizens. (stative)

Verbs that typically express static meaning can show dynamic meaning when expressed as a get-passive, as with be known (static) vs. get known (dynamic).

Zoltan is known for hosting big parties. (static)
Get your foot in the door, get known. (dynamic)[15]

See also

References

  1. ↑ O'Grady, William; John Archibald; Mark Aronoff; Janie Rees-Miller (2001). Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction (Fourth ed.). Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's. ISBN 0-312-24738-9.
  2. 1 2 3 Kroeger, Paul (2005). Analyzing Grammar: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 052181622X.
  3. ↑ Booij, Geert E.; Christian Lehmann; Joachim Mugdan; Stavros Skopeteas (2004). Morphologie / Morphology. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-019427-2. Retrieved 13 September 2013.
  4. 1 2 Saeed, John (1997). Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-20035-5.
  5. ↑ Croft, William (1991). Syntactic Categories and Grammatical Relations: The Cognitive Organization of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-12090-2.
  6. ↑ Freeman, Jan (2009-03-22). "Active resistance: What we get wrong about the passive voice". The Boston Globe (Boston). ISSN 0743-1791. Retrieved 2010-03-01. All good writers use the passive voice.
  7. ↑ Merriam-Webster (1989). Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage. Merriam-Webster. pp. 720–21. ISBN 978-0-87779-132-4.
  8. ↑ Siewierska, Anna (1984). Passive: A Comparative Linguistic Analysis. London: Croom Helm. p. 255.
  9. 1 2 Dixon, R.M.W. (1994). Ergativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 146.
  10. 1 2 Tsujimura, Natsuko (1996). An Introduction to Japanese Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-19855-5.
  11. 1 2 Mithun, Marianne (2000). "Valency-changing derivation in Central Alaskan Yup'ik". In R.M.W. Dixon & Alexendra Aikhenvald. Changing Valency: Case Studies in Transitivity. Cambridge University Press. p. 90.
  12. ↑ Anagnostopoulou, Elena (2003). "Participles and voice". In A. Alexiadou, M. Rathert, and A. von Stechow. Perfect Explorations. Walter de Gruyter. pp. 1–36. ISBN 978-3-11-090235-8.
  13. ↑ Maienborn, Claudia (2008). "Das Zustandspassiv. Grammatische Einordnung – Bildungsbeschränkung – Interpretationsspielraum". Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik (in German) 35 (1-2): 1–268. doi:10.1515/ZGL.2007.005.
  14. ↑ Grebe, Paul, ed. (1973). Die Grammatik der deutschen Gegenwartssprache [Grammar of the contemporary German language] (3rd ed.). Mannheim: Dudenverlag. pp. 91–95. ISBN 3-411-00914-4.
  15. ↑ Knabe, Norman (January 2009). The Get-Passives as an Emotive Language Device. GRIN Verlag. ISBN 978-3-640-25174-2. Retrieved 13 November 2012.

External links

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