Active Voice Sentence

An Active Voice Sentence is a declarative sentence where the sentence subject expresses the agent of the main verb.

• Context:
  • It can range from being a simple active sentence to being a complex active sentence.
  • It can range from being a past tense active sentence to being a future tense active sentence.
  • It can range from being a declarative active sentence to being an interrogative active sentence to being ...
• Example(s):
  • “I broke the window.”
  • “The man hugged a cat.”
  • “When ants invaded my apartment was invaded, I had to think of ways to fumigate”.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • a Passive Voice Sentence, such as “The cat was hugged by the man.”
• See: Middle Voice, Grammatical Voice, Markedness, Transitive Verb, Nominative–Accusative Language, Agent (Grammar), Patient (Grammar).

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References

2015

• (Wikipedia, 2015) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/active_voice Retrieved:2015-9-14.
  • Active voice is a grammatical voice common in many of the world's languages. It is the unmarked voice for clauses featuring a transitive verb in nominative–accusative languages, including English and most other Indo-European languages.

    Active voice is used in a clause whose subject expresses the agent of the main verb. That is, the subject does the action designated by the verb. A sentence whose agent is marked as grammatical subject is called an active sentence. In contrast, a sentence in which the subject has the role of patient or theme is named a passive sentence, and its verb is expressed in passive voice. Many languages have both an active and a passive voice; this allows for greater flexibility in sentence construction, as either the semantic agent or patient may take the syntactic role of subject.

2009

• (WordNet, 2009) ⇒ http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=active%20voice
  • S: (n) active voice, active (the voice used to indicate that the grammatical subject of the verb is performing the action or causing the happening denoted by the verb) "`The boy threw the ball' uses the active voice"
• (Wikipedia, 2009) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_Voice
  • In grammar, 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 arguments (subject, object, etc.). When the subject 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 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 (optional) complement. 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.

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