From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Grammatical voice

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

When the subject is the agent or actor of the verb, the verb is said to be in the active voice. When the subject is patient, target or undergoer of the action, it is said to be in the passive voice. For example, "The cat ate the mouse" is active, but "The mouse was eaten by the cat" is passive.

In a passive voice sentence, the subject and the direct object switch places. The direct object is promoted to subject, and the subject is demoted to a complement (that may be left out).

In English, the passive voice is a periphrastic construction, i .e. it's modelled using an ad hoc phrase structure with a different word order, an auxiliary verb and a participle of the main verb. In other languages, such as Latin, the passive voice is simply marked on the verb as an inflection.

Some languages (e. g. Sanskrit and Classical Greek) have a "middle voice". An intransitive verb that appears active but expresses a passive action characterizes the English middle voice. For example, in "The casserole cooked in the oven", "cooked" is syntactically active but semantically passive, putting it in the middle voice.

Many deponent verbs in Latin are also survivals of the Indo-European middle voice; many of these in turn survive as obligatory pseudo-reflexive verbs in the Romance languages such as French and Spanish.

Some languages have even more grammatical voices. For example, in Classic Mongolian there are five voices: active, passive, causative, reciprocal and cooperative.

Ergative languages usually don't have a passive voice, since their syntactic structure doesn't agree with it; instead some have an antipassive voice that deletes the object of transitive verbs.

Topic-prominent languages like Mandarin and Japanese tend not to have a passive voice, or to use it only in very special cases.

Usage of the English passive voice

Some people consider it bad practice to use the passive voice in English, because it obscures the subject. This is a difference in approach between the UK and the USA. In the UK, passive voice is more commonly used, while in the USA, people prefer to use the active voice. Formal and business communications often use passive voice more often than in everyday speech, though educators and readability experts especially dislike the use of passive voice.

• 
  People made mistakes.
  
• 
  Mistakes were made.