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In English, as in many other languages, the passive voice is a grammatical voice in which the subject receives the action
of a transitive verb. Passive voice emphasizes the process rather than who is performing the action. Passive (or passive
verb[1]) refers more generally to verbs using this construction and the passages in which they are used. In English, a
passive verb is periphrastic; that is, it does not have a one-word form, but consists of an auxiliary verb plus the past
participle of the transitive verb. The auxiliary verb usually is a form of the verb to be, but other auxiliary verbs, such as get,
are sometimes used. The passive voice can be used in any number of tenses. The process of changing an active verb
into a passive one is called passivization. Passivization is a valence-decreasing process, and it is sometimes referred to
as a detranzitivizing process, because it changes transitive verbs intro intransitives.[2]
In the following passage from the Declaration of Independence, the passive verbs are bolded, while the active
verb hold and the copulative verb are areitalicized:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
One can still introduce the actor of a passive verb using a by phrase as was done in the example above. When such a
phrase is missing, the construction is called an agentless passive. Agentless passives are sometimes preferred in official
writing because they are less confrontational, for instance when announcing someone's firing. Agentless passives are also
used in scientific writing, where they are intended to provide an objective description in terms of processes rather than
people. Using an agentless passive, a scientist may write:
without saying who actually did it, which is (or should be) irrelevant as far as the scientific process goes. This approach to
scientific writing is not universally accepted, and some US organization, like the The Council of Biology Editors, have
called for a more direct, active voice approach. Another entrenched use is the double passiveconstruction used in
American court reporting.[1]
The active voice is the dominant voice in English at large, and many commentators, notably George Orwell in his essay
"Politics and the English Language" and Strunk & White in The Elements of Style, have urged that the use of the passive
voice should be minimized. However, there is general agreement that the passive is useful when the receiver of the action
is more important than the doer.[3]
Generally, use transitive verbs, that strike their object; and use them in the active voice, eschewing the stationary passive, with its little
auxiliary its’s and was’s, and its participles getting into the light of your adjectives, which should be few. For, as a rough law, by his use
[5]
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.'
Two years later, William Strunk, Jr. cautioned against overuse of the passive voice in The Elements of Style, in a passage
retained in later editions co-authored by E.B. White:
The active voice is usually more direct and vigorous than the passive . . . . This rule does not, of course, mean that the writer should
entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary. . . . The need of making a particular word
the subject of the sentence will often . . . determine which voice is to be used. The habitual use of the active voice, however, makes for
forcible writing. This is true not only in narrative principally concerned with action, but in writing of any kind. 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.[6]
In his 1946 essay, "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell stated as one of his principal rules of composition,
"Never use the passive where you can use the active."
Many contemporary usage guides continue to advise against the passive voice, as in this 1993 example from The
Columbia Guide to Standard American English:
Active voice makes subjects do something (to something); passive voice permits subjects to have something done to them (by
someone or something). Some argue that active voice is more muscular, direct, and succinct, passive voice flabbier, more indirect, and
wordier. 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.[7]
Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; and the crooked shall be made
straight, and the rough places plain. (King James Bible, Isaiah 40:4.)
Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York. (William Shakespeare's Richard
III, I.1, ll. 1–2.)
For of those to whom much is given, much is required. (John F. Kennedy's 1961 address to the Massachusetts
legislature.[9])
Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. (Winston Churchill addressing the
House of Commons on 20 August 1940.)
According to Merriam–Webster'snn Dictionary of English Usage, the passive voice should be used when the receiver of
the action is more important than the doer, or when the doer is unknown, unimportant, or perhaps too obvious to be worth
mentioning, as in these examples:
The child was struck by the car.
The store was robbed last night.
Plows should not be kept in the garage.
Kennedy was elected president.[3]
The passive voice can also be used to make other changes to a sentence's emphasis, including emphasizing a modifying
adverb or even the performer of the action: "The breakthrough was achieved by Burlingame and Evans, two researchers
in the university’s genetic engineering lab."[10] The passive voice is sometimes used to conceal the performer of an action
or the identity of a person responsible for a mistake: "We had hoped to report on this problem but the data was
inadvertently deleted from our files."[10] It is this use of the passive voice, to evade responsibility, that has been the subject
of greatest criticism.[3][10]
The passive voice is often used in scientific writing because of the tone of detachment and impersonality that it helps
establish.[3][10] However, some scientific journals prefer writers to use the active voice. [11]
Passive constructions
In general, the passive voice is used to place focus on the grammatical patient, rather than the agent. This often occurs
when the patient is the topic of the sentence. However, the passive voice can also be used when the focus is on the
agent.
Canonical passives
Passive constructions have a range of meanings and uses. The canonical use is to map a clause with a direct object to a
corresponding clause where the direct object has become the subject. For example:
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 original "demoted" subject can typically be re-inserted using the preposition by.
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
forms, the indirect object has been promoted and the direct object has been left in place. (In "A book was given to Mary",
the direct object is promoted and the indirect object left in place. In this respect, English resembles dechticaetiative
languages.)
They talked about the problem. → The problem was talked about.
In the passive form here, the preposition is "stranded"; that is, it is not followed by an object. (See Preposition stranding.)
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 describeevents 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:
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:
Here, relieved is an ordinary adjective, though it derives from the past participle of relieve,[12] and that past participle may
be used in canonical passives:
In some cases, the line between an adjectival passive and a stative passive may be unclear.
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:
Commonly, either or both verbs may be moved into the active voice:
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,[13] but it is nonetheless attested in a
variety of contexts.[14]
Although the passive voice, when used in the predicate verb of a complete sentence, requires the past participle to be
accompanied by a form of be or another auxiliary verb, the past participle alone usually carries passive force; the auxiliary
verb can therefore be omitted in certain circumstances:
Couple found slain; Murder-suicide suspected.[15]
The problem, unless dealt with, will only get worse.
A person struck by lightning has a high chance of survival.
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:
Reflexive verbs
A reflexive verb is a transitive verb one of whose object 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:
Nonetheless, sometimes English reflexive verbs have a passive sense, expressing an agentless action. Consider the
verb solve, as in the following sentences:
One could not say that the problem truly solved anything; rather, what is meant is that the problem was solved without
anyone's solving it.
Similarly, certain transitive verbs can take a subject referring to a person and an object referring to the same person or to
one of his body parts, again with a passive sense.[16] Consider the verb break:
The two sentences are almost synonymous, but the explicit passive construction is less idiomatic.
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 easiest way to make more space would be to install more shelving.
The first step is to read the manual.
Misuse of term
The term "passive voice" is sometimes misused to refer to sentence constructions that do not clearly identify the agent of
the action described.[17] An example is the following passage from The New Yorker, which refers to Bernard Madoff and in
which the misidentified "passive" verbs have been bolded:
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."[18]
In actuality, would end and began are intransitive verbs in the active voice.[19] However, the way in which the speaker uses
them subtly diverts responsibility. While the passive voice is often criticized for its allowance of this practice, this example
demonstrates how active constructions can also achieve this result.
Strunk & White, in The Elements of Style, apply the term to several constructions that are technically active. Geoffrey
Pullum writes:
Of the four pairs of examples offered to show readers what to avoid and how to correct it, a staggering three out of the four are
mistaken diagnoses. "At dawn the crowing of a rooster could be heard" is correctly identified as a passive clause, but the other three
are all errors:
"There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground" has no sign of the passive in it anywhere.
"It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had" also contains nothing that is even reminiscent of
"The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired" is presumably fingered as passive because of
Notes
2. ^ Paul Kroeger, Analyzing grammar: an introduction, Cambridge University Press, 2005, ISBN 052181622X, p. 272
4. ^ Arnold Zwicky, How long have we been avoiding the passive, and why?, in Language Log, 2006 July 22.
8. ^ Jan Freeman, "Active resistance: What we get wrong about the passive voice," Boston Globe, 2009 March 22.
12. ^ Language Log: How to defend yourself from bad advice about writing
13. ^ The American Heritage Book of English Usage, ch. 1, sect. 24 "double passive." Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
15. ^ Joshua Benton, "Couple found slain; Murder-suicide suspected," 1998 February 10.
16. ^ Benjamin Zimmer, “Shia crushed his hand?”, in Language Log, 2008 August 5.
17. ^ Mark Liberman, "'Passive Voice' — 1397-2009 — R.I.P.," in Language Log, 2009 March 12.
18. ^ Nancy Franklin, "The Dolor of Money," The New Yorker, 2009 March 23, at 24, 25.
19. ^ Mark Liberman, "The aggrieved passive voice," in Language Log, 2009 March 16.
20. ^ Pullum, Geoffrey K (17 April 2009). "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice". The Chronicle of Higher Education 55 (32): B15.
Retrieved 2009-04-12.