English passive voice

In English, the passive voice is marked by a subject that is followed by a stative verb complemented by a past participle.

Above, the agent is omitted entirely, but it may also be included adjunctively while maintaining the passive voice: The enemy was defeated by our troops.

Caesar was stabbed by Brutus.The initial examples rewritten in the active voice yield: Our troops defeated the enemy.

[6] An example of this incorrect usage can be found in the following extract from an article from The New Yorker about Bernard Madoff (bolding and italics added; bold text indicates the verbs misidentified as passive voice): Two sentences later, Madoff said, "When I began the Ponzi scheme, I believed it would end shortly, and I would be able to extricate myself, and my clients, from the scheme."

As he read this, he betrayed no sense of how absurd it was to use the passive voice in regard to his scheme, as if it were a spell of bad weather that had descended on him ...

In most of the rest of the statement, one not only heard the aggrieved passive voice, but felt the hand of a lawyer: "To the best of my recollection, my fraud began in the early nineteen-nineties.

[9] The last sentence illustrates a frequently criticized use of the passive, as the evasion of responsibility by failure to mention the agent (which may even be the speaker themselves).

[11] For example: In more technical terms, such uses can be expected in sentences where the agent is the focus (comment, rheme), while the patient (the undergoer of the action) is the topic or theme[9] (see Topic–comment).

For, as a rough law, by his use of the straight verb and by his economy of adjectives you can tell a man's style, if it be masculine or neuter, writing or 'composition'.

Many a tame sentence of description or exposition can be made lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice for some such perfunctory expression as there is or could be heard.

If you want your words to seem impersonal, indirect, and noncommittal, passive is the choice, but otherwise, active voice is almost invariably likely to prove more effective.

[27] Another advisor, Joseph M. Williams, who has written several books on style, states with greater clarity that the passive is often the better choice.

[28] According to Williams, the choice between active and passive depends on the answers to three questions:[28] Bryan A. Garner, in Garner's Modern English Usage, stresses the advantages of the active voice, but gives the following examples of where the passive is preferred:[29] Merriam–Webster's Dictionary of English Usage recommends the passive voice when identifying the object (receiver) of the action is more important than the subject (agent), and when the agent is unknown, unimportant, or not worth mentioning: The linguist Geoffrey Pullum writes that "The passive is not an undesirable feature limited to bad writing, it's a useful construction often needed for clear expression, and every good writer uses it.

Writers have preferred placing the agent at the end of a clause or sentence to give it greater emphasis, as in the examples given in the previous section: Agentless passives were once common in scientific writing, where the agent may be irrelevant, although at least one publisher considers this a "fading practice":[30] The passive voice is used more frequently in scientific writing than in other prose, where it is relatively rare.

[20] A statistical study of a variety of periodicals found a maximum incidence of 13 percent passive constructions.

For example, the active clause: contains threw as a transitive verb with John as its subject and the ball as its direct object.

It is often possible to use the verb get as an alternative (possibly with slightly different meaning); for example, the active sentence "The ball hit Bob" may be recast in either of the following forms: The auxiliary verb of the passive voice (be or get) may appear in any combination of tense, aspect and mood, and can also appear in non-finite form (infinitive, participle or gerund).

Another situation in which the passive uses a different construction than the active involves the verb make, meaning "compel".

Fowler[37] calls it "clumsy and incorrect", suggesting that it springs from false analogy with the former (acceptable) type of double passive, though conceding its usefulness in some legal and quasi-legal language.

Other verbs mentioned (besides attempt) with which the construction is found include begin, desire, hope, propose, seek and threaten.

[42] So, if a noun phrase in the passive needs to get Case from the participle verb, it must undergo movement to the head of the sentence CP to receive nominative Case.ii Wanner argues that identification of the passive voice construction can't solely rely on the auxiliary be and the past participle as distinguishing features because the auxiliary be is also used to express the progressive aspect and the past participle can be found in multiple constructions that are not passive voice constructions.

Implicit here refers to the fact that these arguments can be implied and are not required to be explicit when used in a passive construction.

Above, IMP is the reference to PRO because the books didn't sell themselves to make money, someone, who the interpreter of the sentence knows exists implicitly, sold them.

In Chomsky's generative grammar, the following example of a passive with the auxiliary be and a by phrase, gives the same reading as in an active sentence.

One argument using the lens of cognitive grammar claims that this is due to how auxiliary be functions in the passive.

This view claims that in German and Dutch, the verbs are structural case assigners which is why they are able to passivized in those languages.

Another Case-related argument varies slightly, still agreeing that no passive can be formed since the verb has no object, meaning no case can be assigned.

[45] [Ellei got PROi hired ti] Above, PRO has to refer to Elle, making it a subject control verb.

[47] Another construction sometimes referred to as passival involves a wider class of verbs, and was used in English until the nineteenth century.

Sentences having this construction feature progressive aspect and resemble the active voice, but with meaning like the passive.