Voice (grammar)


In grammar, the voice of a verb describes the relationship between the action that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its arguments. When the subject is the agent or doer of the action, the verb is in the active voice. When the subject is the patient, target or undergoer of the action, the verb is said to be in the passive voice. Voice is sometimes called diathesis.
For example, in the sentence:
the verb "ate" is in the active voice. However, in the sentence:
the verbal phrase "was eaten" is passive.
In the sentence:
the verb "killed" is in the active voice, and the doer of the action is the "hunter".
A passive version of the sentence is:
where the verbal phrase "was killed" is followed by the word "by" and then by the doer "hunter".
In a transformation from an active-voice clause to an equivalent passive-voice construction, the subject and the direct object switch grammatical roles. The direct object gets promoted to subject, and the subject demoted to an adjunct. In the first example above, the mouse serves as the direct object in the active-voice version, but becomes the subject in the passive version. The subject of the active-voice version, the cat, becomes part of a prepositional phrase in the passive version of the sentence, and can be left out entirely.

History

In the grammar of Ancient Greek, voice was called διάθεσις "arrangement" or "condition", with three subcategories: active, passive, and middle.
In Latin there are two voices: active and passive.

Active

The active voice is the most commonly used in many languages and represents the "normal" case, in which the subject of the verb is the agent.
In the active voice, the subject of the sentence performs the action or causes the happening denoted by the verb.
Example: Kabaisa ate the potatoes.
The verb ate indicates the active voice. But consider the following sentence which is in passive voice:
The potatoes were eaten by Kabaisa.
The words were eaten indicate the passive voice.
The passive voice shows that something has been acted upon by someone or something else.

Passive

The passive voice is employed in a clause whose subject expresses the theme or patient of the verb. That is, it undergoes an action or has its state changed.
In the passive voice the grammatical subject of the verb is the recipient of the action denoted by the verb.
Some languages, such as English and Spanish, use a periphrastic passive voice; that is, it is not a single word form, but rather a construction making use of other word forms. Specifically, it is made up of a form of the auxiliary verb to be and a past participle of the main verb. In other languages, such as Latin, the passive voice for some tenses is simply marked on the verb by inflection: librum legit "He reads the book"; liber legitur "The book is read".

Middle

Some languages have a middle voice, which is a set of inflections or constructions which is to some extent different from both the active and passive voices.
In some cases, the middle voice is any grammatical option where the subject of a material process cannot be categorized as either an Actor or a Goal. For example, while the passive voice expresses a Medium being affected by an external Agent as in The casserole was cooked in the oven, the middle voice expresses a Medium undergoing change without any external Agent The casserole cooked in the oven. In English, the inflections and constructions for middle voice and active voice are the same for these cases. In other cases such as in Classical Greek, the middle voice is often used for material processes where the Subject is both the Actor and the Medium as in "the man got a shave", opposing both active and passive voices where the Medium is the Goal as in "the barber shaved the man" and "the man got shaved by the barber". Finally, it can occasionally be used in a causative sense, such as "The father causes his son to be set free", or "The father ransoms his son".
In English there is no verb form for the middle voice, though some uses may be classified by traditional grammarians as middle voice, often resolved via a reflexive pronoun, as in "Fred shaved", which may be expanded to "Fred shaved himself" – contrast with active "Fred shaved John" or passive "John was shaved by Fred". This need not be reflexive, as in "my clothes soaked in detergent overnight". English used to have a distinct form, called the passival, which was displaced over the early 19th century by the progressive passive and is no longer used in English. In the passival, one might say "The house is building.", which may today be rendered instead as "The house is being built." Likewise "The meal is eating.", which is now "The meal is being eaten." Note that the similar "Fred is shaving" and "The meal is cooking" remain grammatical. It is suggested that the progressive passive was popularized by the Romantic poets, and is connected with Bristol usage.
Many deponent verbs in Latin are survivals of the Proto-Indo-European middle voice.

Others

Some languages have even more grammatical voices. For example, Classical Mongolian features five voices: active, passive, causative, reciprocal, and cooperative. Hebrew has active, passive, causative, causative-passive, intensive, intensive-passive and reflexive voices.
The antipassive voice deletes or demotes the object of transitive verbs, and promotes the actor to an intransitive subject. This voice is very common among ergative–absolutive languages, but also occurs among nominative–accusative languages.
There are also constructions in some languages that appear to change the valence of a verb, but in fact do not. So called hierarchical or inversion languages are of this sort. Their agreement system will be sensitive to an external person or animacy hierarchy : 1 > 2 > 3 or Anim > Inan and so forth. E.g., in Meskwaki, verbs inflect for both subject and object, but agreement markers do not have inherent values for these. Rather, a third marker, the direct or inverse marker, indicates the proper interpretation: ne-wa:pam-e:-w-a "I am looking at him", but ne-wa:pam-ekw-w-a "He is looking at me". Some scholars have analyzed this as a kind of obligatory passivization dependent on animacy, while others have claimed it is not a voice at all, but rather see inversion as another type of alignment, parallel to nominative–accusative, ergative–absolutive, split-S, and fluid-S alignments.

Passive in topic-prominent languages

Chinese

Mandarin

s like Mandarin tend not to employ the passive voice as frequently. In general, Mandarin is best analyzed as using middle voice, but Mandarin-speakers can construct a passive voice by using the coverb 被 and rearranging the usual word order. For example, this sentence using active voice:
Note: the first line is in Traditional Chinese while the second is Simplified Chinese.
corresponds to the following sentence using passive voice. Note that the agent phrase is optional.
In addition, through the addition of the auxiliary verb "to be" 是 the passive voice is frequently used to emphasize the identity of the actor. This example places emphasis on the dog, presumably as opposed to some other animal:
Mandarin has also an object-retaining passive which contains both object and topic :
被 as a passive marker is a relatively new addition to the language, introduced as part of the early 20th century language reforms that also added gender-specific pronouns such as 他>她 and 你>妳 and culminated in attempts to romanize Chinese entirely. Classically, 被 marked an adversative mood, indicating that something bad had happened. Even today, the following sentence is perfectly acceptable in speech：
In general, Chinese employs middle voice. For a fuller treatment of Chinese morphosyntax see He, Xiaoling, Patient-Subject Constructions In Mandarin Chinese: Syntax, Semantics, Discourse. See also the discussion in works such as Li, Charles N; Thompson, Sandra A, where, arguing against Chao's analysis of Mandarin, the two dispute that there is a distinct class of middle voice verbs, but in so doing recognize that Mandarin verbs as a whole behave the same way.

Cantonese

In Cantonese, those features are quite similar by using the coverb 俾, but the agent phrase is NOT optional, often with a formal agent 人 :
However, in some dialects of Yue, a passive voice with an optional agent phrase is also available:
Qinzhou :
In the actor-emphasizing passive voice of Cantonese, besides the addition of the auxiliary verb "to be" 係, the perfective event is also converted to an adjective-like predicative with the suffix 嘅 or 㗎, which is a more emphasized one from the liaison of 嘅 and 啊 :

Japanese

Although a topic-prominent language, Japanese employs the passive voice quite frequently, and has two types of passive voice, one that corresponds to that in English and an indirect passive not found in English. This indirect passive is used when something undesirable happens to the speaker.

Impersonal voice

While in ordinary passive voice, the object of the action becomes the subject of the sentence, in impersonal passive voice, it remains the grammatical object. The subject can be replaced with an impersonal pronoun, as in English One reads the newspaper, French On lit le journal, or German Man liest die Zeitung.. Similar constructions are sometimes used in English, as in "One reads the newspaper"; "you" and "they" can also be used in an impersonal sense
In other languages, the subject is omitted and a specific impersonal form of the verb is used.

Finnic languages

Verbs in the Finnic languages, such as Finnish and Estonian, have an impersonal voice, often simply called the passive, which omits the subject and retains the grammatical role of the object. It has also been called the "zero person". In Estonian:
Women read the newspaper.
The newspaper is read.
In Estonian, the agent can be included by using the postposition poolt, although using such a construction instead of the active voice is critisised as a foreiginism and characteristic of officialese.
The newspaper is read by women.
In both Finnish and Estonian, the use of the impersonal voice generally implies that the agent is capable of own initiative. For example, Finnish Ikkuna hajotettiin would generally not be used if the window was broken by the wind, rather than a person. In the latter case, one could instead use a reflexive verb in the active voice, such as Ikkuna hajosi.

Celtic languages

have an inflection commonly called the "impersonal" or "autonomous" form, of similar origin to the Latin "passive-impersonal". This is similar to a passive construction in that the agent of the verb is not specified. However its syntax is different from prototypical passives, in that the object of the action remains in the accusative.
It is similar to the use of the pronoun "on" in French. It increasingly corresponds to the passive in modern English, in which there is a trend towards avoiding the use of the passive unless it is specifically required to omit the subject. It also appears to be similar to the "fourth person" mentioned in the preceding paragraph. However, what is called in Irish an briathar saor or the free verb does not suggest passivity but a kind of generalised agency.
The construction has equal validity in transitive and intransitive clauses, and the best translation into English is normally by using the "dummy" subjects "they", "one", or impersonal "you". For example, the common sign against tobacco consumption has its closest direct translation in English as "No smoking":
An example of its use as an intransitive is:
The difference between the autonomous and a true passive is that while the autonomous focuses on the action and overtly avoids mentioning the actor, there is nonetheless an anonymous agent who may be referred to in the sentence. For instance:
In English, the formation of the passive allows the optional inclusion of an agent in a prepositional phrase, "by the man", etc. Where English would leave out the noun phrase, Irish uses the autonomous; where English includes the noun phrase, Irish uses its periphrastic passive – which can also leave out the noun phrase:
The impersonal endings have been re-analysed as a passive voice in Modern Welsh and the agent can be included after the preposition gan :
The newspaper is read.

Dynamic and static passive

Some linguists draw a distinction between static passive voice and dynamic passive voice in some languages. Examples include English, German, Swedish, Spanish and Italian. "Static" means that an action was done to the subject at a certain point in time resulting in a state in the time focussed upon, whereas "dynamic" means that an action takes place.

German

Note that for some speakers of English the dynamic passive constructed with get is not accepted and is considered colloquial or sub-standard.

Swedish

Dynamic passive in Swedish is also frequently expressed with the s-ending.
The vara passive is often synonymous with, and sometimes preferable to, simply using the corresponding adjective:
The bli passive is often synonymous with, and sometimes preferable to, the s-passive:

Spanish

has two verbs corresponding to English to be: ser and estar. Ser is used to form the ordinary passive voice:
However, this construction is very unidiomatic. The usual passive voice is the se pasiva, in which the verb is conjugated in the active voice, but preceded by the se particle:
Estar is used to form what might be termed a static passive voice :
In the ser and estar cases, the verb's participle is used as the complement.

Italian

uses two verbs to translate the static and the dynamic passive:
Dynamic passive auxiliary verb: essere and venire
Static passive auxiliary verb: essere

Venetian

In Venetian the difference between dynamic passive and stative passive is more clear cut, using èser only for the static passives and vegner only for the dynamic passive:
Static forms represents much more a property or general condition, whereas the dynamic form is a real passive action entailing "by someone":

List of voices

Voices found in various languages include: