Grammar Tip # 4: The Passive Voice

Passive Voice Chart
Verb tenses & aspects	Active voice	Passive voice
Present simple	John sells cars.	Cars are sold by John.
Past simple	John sold cars.	Cars were sold by John.
Present continuous	John is selling cars.	Cars are being sold by John.
Past continuous	John was selling cars.	Cars were being sold by John.
Present perfect	John has sold cars.	Cars have been sold by John.
Past perfect	John had sold cars.	Cars had been sold by John.
Future simple	John will sell cars.	Cars will be sold by John.
Conditional	John would sell cars.	Cars would be sold by John.
Future perfect	John will have sold cars.	Cars will have been sold by John.
Conditional perfect	John would sell cars.	Cars would have been sold by John.
Future be going to	John is going to sell cars.	Cars are going to be sold by John.
Future in the past	John was going to sell cars.	Cars were going to be sold by John.

YOU WILL FIND ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT PASSIVE IN ENGLISH IN THE FOLLOWING LINKS:

• ALL ABOUT PASSIVE. Click here and browse the whole site  Highly recommended.
• Tutorial on PASSIVE
• Myths about PASSIVE USE

Reflections Upon English passive voice

The passive voice is a grammatical construction (a "voice") in which the subject of a sentence or clause denotes the recipient of the action rather than the performer. In the English language, the English passive voice is formed with an auxiliary verb (usually be or get) plus a participle (usually the past participle) of a transitive verb.

For example, "Caesar was stabbed by Brutus" uses the passive voice. The subject denotes the individual (Caesar) affected by the action of the verb. The counterpart to this in active voice is, "Brutus stabbed Caesar," in which the subject denotes the doer, or agent, Brutus.

A sentence featuring the passive voice is sometimes called a passive sentence, and a verb phrase in passive voice is sometimes called a passive verb. English differs from languages in which voice is indicated through a simple inflection, since the English passive is periphrastic, composed of an auxiliary verb plus the past participle of the transitive verb.

Use of the English passive varies with writing style and field. Some style sheets discourage use of passive voice, while others encourage it.

Identifying the English passive

In the following excerpt from the 18th-century United States Declaration of Independence (1776), the bold text identifies passive verbs; italicized text identifies the one active verb (hold) and the copulative verb  are:

“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”.

In this case, the agent ("the Creator") of the passive construction can be identified with a by phrase. When such a phrase is missing, the construction is an agentless passive. For example, "Caesar was stabbed" is a perfectly grammatical full sentence, in a way that "stabbed Caesar" and "Brutus stabbed" are not. Agentless passives are common in scientific writing, where the agent may be irrelevant (e.g. "The mixture was heated to 300°C").

It is not the case, however, that any sentence in which the agent is unmentioned or marginalised is an example of the passive voice. Sentences like "There was a stabbing" or "A stabbing occurred" are not passive. See "Misapplication of the term," below for more discussion of this misconception.

Usage and style

Against the passive voice

Many language critics and language-usage manuals discourage use of the passive voice. This advice is not usually found in older guides, emerging only in the first half of the twentieth century.

The Columbia Guide to Standard American English (1993) stated that:

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.

For the passive voice

Passive writing is not necessarily slack and indirect. Many famously vigorous passages use the passive voice, as in these examples:

• 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. (Shakespeare's Richard III, I.1, ll. 1–2)
• For of those to whom much is given, much is required. (John F. Kennedy's quotation of Luke 12:48 in his address to the Massachusetts legislature, 9 January 1961.)
• Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. (Winston Churchill addressing the House of Commons, 20 August 1940.)

Merriam–Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (1994) 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 child was struck by the car.
• The store was robbed last night.
• Plows should not be kept in the garage.
• Kennedy was elected president.

The principal criticism against the passive voice is its potential for evasion of responsibility. This is because a passive clause may omit the agent even where it is important:

• We had hoped to report on this problem, but the data were inadvertently deleted from our files.

However, the passive can also be used to emphasize the agent, and it may be better for that role than the active voice, because the end of a clause is the ideal place to put something you wish to emphasize:

• Don't you see? The patient was murdered by his own doctor!

Similarly, the passive may be useful when modifying the agent, as heavily modified noun phrases also tend to occur last in a clause:

• The breakthrough was achieved by Burlingame and Evans, two researchers in the university's genetic engineering lab.

Passive constructions

In general, the passive voice is used to place focus on the grammatical patient, rather than the agent. This properly 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 o a corresponding clause where the direct object has become the subject. For example:

• 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 "demoted" subject can typically be re-inserted using the preposition by.

• The ball was thrown by John.

Promotion of other objects (Double object passive)

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:

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

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).

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

• 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.

Promotion of content clauses

It is possible to promote a content clause that serves as a direct object. In this case, however, the clause 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 above are all eventive (or dynamic) passives. Stative (or static, or resultative) passives also exist in English; rather than describing an action, they describe the result of an action. English does not usually distinguish between the two. For example:

• The window was broken.

This sentence has two different meanings, roughly the following:

• [Someone] broke the window.
• The window was not intact.

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. 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, and that past participle may be used in canonical passives:

• He was relieved of duty.

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, but it is nonetheless recommended in a variety of contexts.

Misapplication of the term

Occasionally, writers misapply the term passive voice to sentences that do not identify the actor. For example, this extract from The New Yorker magazine refers to the American embezzler Bernard Madoff; bold text identifies the mis-identified passive voice verbs:

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.”

The intransitive verbs would end and began are in the active voice; however, how the speaker uses the words subtly diverts responsibility from him. In The Elements of Style, Strunk and White mis-apply the passive voice term to several active voice constructions; Prof. 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 passive construction.

• “The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired”, is presumably fingered as passive because of impaired, but that’s a mistake. It’s an adjective here.

PLEASE BE PROACTIVE USING PASSIVE. COMMENTS, QUESTIONS AND DOUBTS IN CLASS, AS USUSAL. (HERE AS WELL, OF COURSE!)

HAVE A NICE WEEK.