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In grammar
Grammar

Grammar is the field of linguistics that covers the conventions governing the use of any given natural language. It includes morphology and syntax, often complemented by phonetics, phonology, semantics, and pragmatics....
, the voice (also called gender or diathesis) of a verb describes the relationship between the action (or state) that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its argument
Verb argument

In linguistics, a verb argument is a phrase that appears in a syntax relationship with the verb in a clause. In English language, for example, the two most important arguments are the subject and the direct object ....
s (subject, object, etc.). When the subject
Subject (grammar)

The subject is one of the two main constituent every sentence can be divided into, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle....
 is the agent or actor of the verb, the verb is in the active voice. When the subject is the patient, target or undergoer of the action, it is said to be in the passive voice.

For example, in the sentence:

The cat ate the mouse.


the verb "ate" is in the active voice, but in the sentence:

The mouse was eaten by the cat.


the verbal phrase "was eaten" is passive.

In a transformation
Transformational grammar

In linguistics, a transformational grammar, or transformational-generative grammar , is a generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in a Noam Chomsky tradition....
 from an active-voice clause
Clause

In grammar, a clause is a pair of words or group of words that consists of a subject and a predicate , although in some languages and some types of clauses, the subject may not appear explicitly as a noun phrase....
 to an equivalent passive-voice construction, the subject and the direct object
Object (grammar)

An object in grammar is a sentence element and part of the sentence Predicate . It denotes somebody or something involved in the subject's "performance" of the verb....
 switch grammatical roles.






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In grammar
Grammar

Grammar is the field of linguistics that covers the conventions governing the use of any given natural language. It includes morphology and syntax, often complemented by phonetics, phonology, semantics, and pragmatics....
, the voice (also called gender or diathesis) of a verb describes the relationship between the action (or state) that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its argument
Verb argument

In linguistics, a verb argument is a phrase that appears in a syntax relationship with the verb in a clause. In English language, for example, the two most important arguments are the subject and the direct object ....
s (subject, object, etc.). When the subject
Subject (grammar)

The subject is one of the two main constituent every sentence can be divided into, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle....
 is the agent or actor of the verb, the verb is in the active voice. When the subject is the patient, target or undergoer of the action, it is said to be in the passive voice.

For example, in the sentence:

The cat ate the mouse.


the verb "ate" is in the active voice, but in the sentence:

The mouse was eaten by the cat.


the verbal phrase "was eaten" is passive.

In a transformation
Transformational grammar

In linguistics, a transformational grammar, or transformational-generative grammar , is a generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in a Noam Chomsky tradition....
 from an active-voice clause
Clause

In grammar, a clause is a pair of words or group of words that consists of a subject and a predicate , although in some languages and some types of clauses, the subject may not appear explicitly as a noun phrase....
 to an equivalent passive-voice construction, the subject and the direct object
Object (grammar)

An object in grammar is a sentence element and part of the sentence Predicate . It denotes somebody or something involved in the subject's "performance" of the verb....
 switch grammatical roles. The direct object gets promoted to subject, and the subject demoted to an (optional) complement
Complement (linguistics)

In grammar the term complement is used with different meanings. The primary meaning is a word, phrase or clause which is necessary in a sentence to complete its meaning....
. In the examples 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 could be left out entirely.

The passive voice in English


The English language
English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
 uses a periphrastic
Periphrasis

In linguistics, periphrasis is a device by which a grammar category or relationship is expressed by a free morpheme , instead of being shown by inflection or derivation ....
 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
Participle

In linguistics, a participle is a derivative of a non-finite verb verb, which can be used in compound Grammatical tense or Grammatical voice, or as a Grammatical modifier....
 of the main verb. In other languages, such as Latin, the passive voice is simply marked on the verb by inflection
Inflection

In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the way language handles grammatical relations and relational categories such as grammatical tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, grammatical aspect, grammatical person, grammatical number, grammatical gender, grammatical case....
: poemam legit "He reads the poem"; poema legitur "The poem is read".

The middle voice


Some languages (such as Sanskrit
Sanskrit

Sanskrit is a historical Indo-Aryan language, one of the liturgical languages of Hinduism and Buddhism, and one of the 22 official languages of India....
, Icelandic
Icelandic language

Icelandic is a North Germanic languages, the language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese language and Norwegian dialects such as Telemark dialect and Sognam?l....
 and Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek is the historical stage in the development of the Greek language spanning across the Archaic Greece , Classical Greece , and Hellenistic civilization periods of ancient Greece and the classical antiquity....
) have a middle voice. The middle voice is in the middle of the active and the passive voice because the subject cannot be categorized as either agent or patient but has elements of both. 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 appears syntactically
Syntax

In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing Sentence s in natural languages. In addition to referring to the discipline, the term syntax is also used to refer directly to the rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language, as in "the Irish syntax"....
 active but semantically
Semantics

Semantics is the study of meaning in communication. The word is derived from the Greek language word s??a?t???? , "significant", from s??a??? , "to signify, to indicate" and that from s??a , "sign, mark, token"....
 passive, putting it in the middle voice. In Classical Greek
Greek language

Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
, the middle voice is often reflexive, denoting that the subject acts on or for itself, such as "The boy washes himself", or "The boy washes." It can be transitive or intransitive. 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."

Many deponent verb
Deponent verb

In linguistics, a deponent verb is a verb that is active voice in meaning but takes its morphology from a different grammatical voice, most commonly the middle voice or passive voice....
s in Latin
Latin

Latin is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Military history of the Roman Empire, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe....
 represent survivals of the Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European language

The Proto-Indo-European language is the unattested, linguistic reconstruction common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans....
 middle voice; many of these in turn survive as obligatory pseudo-reflexive verb
Reflexive verb

In grammar, a reflexive verb is a verb whose semantic Theta role are the same. For example, the English language verb to perjure is reflexive, since one can only perjure oneself....
s in the Romance languages such as French
French language

French is a Romance language spoken around the world by around 80 million people as first language, by 190 million as second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired tongue, with significant speakers in 54 countries....
 and Spanish
Spanish language

Spanish or Castilian is a Romance languages that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade....
.

Other grammatical voices


Some languages have even more grammatical voices. For example, Classic Mongolian
Mongolian language

The Mongolian language is the best-known member of the Mongolic languages. It is the language of most residents of Mongolia and of many of the Mongolian residents of Inner Mongolia, totalling about 5.7 million speakers....
 features five voices: active, passive, causative, reciprocal and cooperative.

The antipassive voice
Antipassive voice

The antipassive voice is a verb Grammatical voice that works on transitive verbs by deleting the object . They are much rarer than the more familiar passive voice, to which they are similar in decreasing the verb's valency by one....
 deletes or demotes the object of transitive verbs, and promotes the actor to an intransitive subject. This voice is very common among ergative languages (which may feature passive voices as well), but rare among nominative-accusative language
Nominative-accusative language

A nominative?accusative language, or simply an accusative language, is a language that marks the object of transitive verbs distinguishing them from the subject of both transitive and intransitive verbs....
s.

There are also phenomena that look at first glance like they change the valence
Valency (linguistics)

In linguistics, verb valency or valence refers to the number of verb argument controlled by a verbal predicate . It is related, though not identical, to transitive verb, which counts only object arguments of the verbal predicate....
 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 (or a combination of both): 1 > 2 > 3 or Anim > Inan and so forth. E.g., in Meskwaki (an Algonquian language), 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 [1-look.at-DIR-3-3Sg] "I am looking at him", but ne-wa:pam-ekw-w-a [1-look.at-INV-3-3Sg] "He is looking at me". Some scholars (notably Rhodes) 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 yet another kind of alignment type, parallel to nominative/accusative
Nominative-accusative language

A nominative?accusative language, or simply an accusative language, is a language that marks the object of transitive verbs distinguishing them from the subject of both transitive and intransitive verbs....
, ergative/absolutive
Ergative-absolutive language

An ergative?absolutive language is a language that treats the Verb argument of an intransitive verb like the Object of a transitive verb, but distinctly from the agent of a transitive verb....
, split-S, and fluid-S alignments.

The passive voice in topic-prominent languages


Topic-prominent language
Topic-prominent language

A topic-prominent language is a language that organizes its syntax so that Sentence s have a topic-comment structure, in which the topic is the thing being talked about and the comment is what is said about the topic....
s like Mandarin
Mandarin (linguistics)

Mandarin , is a category of related Chinese dialects spoken across most of northern and south-western China. When taken as a separate language, as is often done in academic literature, the Mandarin language has more native speakers than any other language....
 tend not to employ the passive voice as frequently. Mandarin-speakers construct the passive voice by prefixing the active noun phrase with bei- 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.

????????
????????
Gouyao-lezhegenanren.
dogbite-PERFECTthisman
"A dog bit this man."


corresponds to this sentence using passive voice:

?????????
?????????
Zhegenanrenbeigouyao-le.
Thismanbydogbite-PERFECT.
"This man was bitten by a dog."


In addition, through the addition of the auxiliary verb "to be" (shi) the passive voice is frequently used to emphasise the identity of the actor. This example places emphasis on the dog, presumably as opposed to some other animal:

??????????
??????????
Zhegenanrenshibeigouyao-le.
Thismanto bebydogbite-PERFECT.
"This man was bitten by a dog."


Although a topic-prominent language, Japanese
Japanese language

IPA: [n?iho?go] is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is related to the Ryukyuan languages....
 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.

?????????????
Karewadorobonisaifuonusumareta.
HeTOPICthiefAGENTwalletOBJECTsteal-PASSIVE-PAST
"His wallet was stolen by a thief."


????????????
Bokuwakanojoniusootsukareta.
ITOPICherAGENTlieOBJECTtell-PASSIVE-PAST.
"I was lied to by her." (or "She lied to me.")


The fourth person in Baltic-Finnic languages


Some languages do not contrast voices, but similar-looking persons. For example, Baltic-Finnic languages
Baltic-Finnic languages

The Baltic-Finnic languages, spoken around the Baltic Sea by about 7 million people, are a branch of Finnic languages belonging to the Finno-Ugric group of the Uralic languages....
 such as Finnish
Finnish language

Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by Finnish people outside of Finland. It is one of the official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden....
 and Estonian
Estonian language

Estonian is the official language of Estonia, spoken by about 1.1 million people in Estonia and tens of thousands in various ?migr? communities....
 have a "passive", which conceptually postulates a never-mentioned "fourth person" (called "passive" or "common person" in Finnish) rather than varying subjectivity or objectivity. For example, translating the sentence "The house was blown down" as Talo puhallettiin maahan would give the idea that some unmentioned person is blowing the house down by the force of his breath. Also, transitivity
Transitive verb

In syntax, a transitive verb is a verb that requires both a direct subject and one or more object s....
 may be used, such that the fourth-person Ongelma ratkaistiin, which uses the transitive, means "Someone solved the problem", while the fourth-person Ongelma ratkesi uses the anticausative
Anticausative verb

An anticausative verb is an intransitive verb that shows an event affecting its subject, while giving no semantic or syntactic indication of the cause of the event....
, and means "The problem was solved".

The autonomous in Celtic languages

Celtic languages
Celtic languages

The Celtic languages are descended from Proto-Celtic, or "Common Celtic", a branch of the greater Indo-European languages language family. The term "Celtic" was used to describe this language group by Edward Lhuyd in 1707, having much earlier been used by Greek and Roman writers to describe tribes in central Gaul....
 possess a person/number inflection called the "autonomous" or "impersonal", which has been associated with a passive interpretation, though its syntax is different from canonical passives because the patient of the action is in the accusative, not the nominative. It can be translated into English as the nebulous "they", "one", or the impersonal "you". For example, the common sign interdicting tobacco consumption:

NáCáitearTabac
DON'Tconsume-autonomoustobacco.


The difference between the autonomous and a true passive is that to the speaker, the autonomous indicates that there is in fact no agent, whereas the passive indicates the demotion of an agent. 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 the passive.

Dynamic and static passive


Some languages draw a distinction between static (or stative) passive voice, and dynamic (or eventive) passive voice. Examples include German
German language

German is a West Germanic languages, thus related to and classified alongside English language and Dutch language. It is one of the world's world language and the most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union....
, Spanish
Spanish language

Spanish or Castilian is a Romance languages that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade....
 and Italian
Italian language

Italian is a Romance languages spoken by about 63 million people as a first language, primarily in Italy. In Switzerland, Italian is one of four Linguistic geography of Switzerlands....
. "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.

In German

Static passive auxiliary verb: sein

Dynamic passive auxiliary verb: werden

Ich bin am 20. August geboren ("I was born on August 20", static)

Ich wurde am 20. August geboren ("I became born on August 20", dynamic)

In Spanish

Spanish
Spanish language

Spanish or Castilian is a Romance languages that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade....
 has three verbs corresponding to English be: ser, estar and haber. Two types of passive voice are formed by them. Ser is used to form the ordinary (dynamic) passive voice:

La puerta es abierta. "The door is opened [by someone]."
La puerta es cerrada. "The door is closed [by someone]."


(Note that this construction is very unidiomatic in this case. The usual phrasing would be La puerta se cierra.) Estar is used to form the static passive voice (not regarded as a passive voice in traditional Spanish grammar
Spanish grammar

Spanish is a language originating in North-Central Spain which is spoken throughout Spain, most countries in the Americas, the Philippines and Equatorial Guinea....
):

La puerta está abierta. "The door is open," i.e. it has been opened.
La puerta está cerrada. "The door is closed," i.e. it has been closed.


In both cases, the verb's participle is used as the complement (as is sometimes the case in English). The verb haber does not form any type of passive voice.

In Italian

Italian
Italian language

Italian is a Romance languages spoken by about 63 million people as a first language, primarily in Italy. In Switzerland, Italian is one of four Linguistic geography of Switzerlands....
 uses two verbs (essere and venire) to translate the static and the dynamic passive:

Dynamic passive auxiliary verb: essere and venire (to be and to come)
La porta è aperta. or La porta viene aperta. "The door is opened [by someone]" or "The door comes open [by someone]".
La porta è chiusa. or La porta viene chiusa. "The door is closed [by someone]" or "The door comes closed [by someone]".


Static passive auxiliary verb: essere (to be)
La porta è aperta. "The door is open," i.e. it has been opened.
La porta è chiusa. "The door is closed," i.e. it has been closed.


In Venetian


In Venetian
Venetian language

Venetian or Venetan is a Romance languages spoken by over two million people, mostly in the Veneto region of Italy. The language is called v?neto in Venetian, veneto in Italian; the variant spoken in Venice is called venexi?n/venesi?n or veneziano, respectively....
 (Vèneto) the difference between dynamic (true) passive and stative (adjectival) passive is more clear cut, using èser (to be) only for the static passives and vegner (to become, to come) only for the dynamic passive:

La porta la vien verta. "The door is opened", dynamic
La porta la xè / l'è verta. "The door is open", static


Static forms represents much more a property or general condition, whereas the dynamic form is a real passive action entailing "by someone":

èser proteto. "To be protected = to be in a safe condition", static
vegner proteto. "To be protected = to be defended (by so)", dynamic


èser considarà. "To be considered = to have a (good) reputation", static
vegner considarà. "To be taken into consideration (by people, by so)", dynamic


èser raprexentà (a l'ONU). "To be represented (at the UN) = to have a representation", static
vegner raprexentà a l'ONU (da un delegà). "To be represented at the UN (by a delegate)", dynamic


List of voices

Voices found in various languages include:
  • Active voice
  • Passive voice
  • Middle voice
  • Mediopassive voice
    Mediopassive voice

    The mediopassive voice is a grammatical voice which subsumes the meanings of both the middle voice and the passive voice.Languages of the Indo-European languages family typically have two or three voices of the three: active, middle, and passive....
  • Impersonal passive voice
    Impersonal passive voice

    The impersonal passive voice is a verb Grammatical voice that decreases the Valency of an intransitive verb to zero.The impersonal passive deletes the subject of an intransitive verb....
  • Antipassive voice
    Antipassive voice

    The antipassive voice is a verb Grammatical voice that works on transitive verbs by deleting the object . They are much rarer than the more familiar passive voice, to which they are similar in decreasing the verb's valency by one....
  • Reflexive voice (the subject and the object of the verb are the same, as in I cut myself)
  • Reciprocal voice
    Reciprocal (grammar)

    A reciprocal is a Linguistics structure that marks a particular kind of relationship between two noun phrases. In a reciprocal construction, each of the thematic role occupies both the role of agent and patient with respect to each other....
     (subject and object perform the verbal action to each other, e. g. I cut her and she cut me)
  • Causative voice
  • Adjutative voice
    Adjutative voice

    The adjutative voice is a grammatical voice carrying the meaning "to help to". The subject of a verb in the adjutative voice is not an agent of the action denoted by the verb, but is assisting an agent in performing the action....
  • Applicative voice
    Applicative voice

    The applicative voice is a grammatical voice which promotes an oblique case argument of a verb to the Patient argument, and indicates the oblique role within the meaning of the verb....
  • Circumstantial voice
    Circumstantial voice

    In grammar, a circumstantial voice, or circumstantial passive voice, is a grammatical voice that promotes an oblique case argument of a verb to the role of subject ; the underlying subject may then be expressed as an oblique argument....


See also

  • Anticausative verb
    Anticausative verb

    An anticausative verb is an intransitive verb that shows an event affecting its subject, while giving no semantic or syntactic indication of the cause of the event....
  • Grammatical conjugation
    Grammatical conjugation

    In linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb, noun or adjective from its principal parts by inflection . Conjugation may be affected by grammatical person, grammatical number, grammatical gender, grammatical tense, Grammatical aspect, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, or other grammatical category....
  • Deponent verb
    Deponent verb

    In linguistics, a deponent verb is a verb that is active voice in meaning but takes its morphology from a different grammatical voice, most commonly the middle voice or passive voice....
  • Dative shift
    Dative shift

    Dative shifting is a grammatical process by which an oblique case argument of a verb, usually one functioning as a recipient or a Benefactive case , is placed in the same grammatical role as a Patient , increasing the valency of the verb and forming a clause with two objects....
  • Description
    Description

    amin is the bestDescription is one of four rhetorical modes , along with exposition, argumentation, and narration. Each of the rhetorical modes is present in a variety of forms and each has its own purpose and conventions....
  • E-Prime
    E-Prime

    E-Prime, short for English-Prime, is a modified form of English language. It uses very slightly simplified syntax and vocabulary, eliminating all forms of the verb to be: be, is, am, are, was, were, been and being ....
  • English passive voice
    English passive voice

    In English language, as in many other languages, the subject of a verb in the passive voice corresponds to the object of the same verb in the active voice....
  • Valency (linguistics)
    Valency (linguistics)

    In linguistics, verb valency or valence refers to the number of verb argument controlled by a verbal predicate . It is related, though not identical, to transitive verb, which counts only object arguments of the verbal predicate....