Passive Voice Sentence
A Passive Voice Sentence is a sentence where the verb object of the action is within the sentence subject/syntactic subject.
- Context:
- It can range from being a Simple Passive Sentence to being a Complex Passive Sentence.
- It can range from being a Past Tense Passive Sentence to being a Future Tense Passive Sentence.
- It can range from being a Declarative Passive Sentence to being an Interrogative Passive Sentence to being ...
- It can range from being an English Passive Sentence, Chinese Passive Sentence, ...
- It can have the Subject in a Prepositional Phrase introduced with the Preposition by (in English).
- Example(s):
- “The window was broken (by me.)”, where by me is optional.
- “A cat was hugged (by a man).”, where by the man is optional.
- “When my apartment was invaded, I had to think of ways to fumigate”.
- …
- Counter-Example(s):
- an Active Voice Sentence, such as “I broke the window.”
- See: Topic–Comment, Voice (Grammar), Subject (Grammar), Patient (Grammar), Active Voice, Agent (Grammar), Object (Grammar), Argument (Linguistics), Adjunct (Grammar), Valency (Linguistics), Transitive Verb, Intransitive Verb.
References
2015
- (Wikipedia, 2015) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/passive_voice Retrieved:2015-9-14.
- Passive voice is a grammatical voice common in many languages. In a clause with passive voice, the grammatical subject expresses the theme or patient of the main verb – that is, the person or thing that undergoes the action or has its state changed. This contrasts with active voice, in which the subject has the agent role. For example, in the passive sentence "The tree was pulled down", the subject (the tree) denotes the patient rather than the agent of the action. In contrast, the sentences "Someone pulled down the tree" and "The tree is down" are active sentences.
Typically, in passive clauses, what is usually expressed by the object (or sometimes another argument) of the verb is now expressed by the subject, while what is usually expressed by the subject is either deleted, or is indicated by some adjunct of the clause. Thus, turning an active verb into a passive verb is a valence-decreasing process ("detransitivizing process"), because it turns transitive verbs into intransitive verbs. This is not always the case; for example in Japanese a passive-voice construction does not necessarily decrease valence.
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. The use of passive voice allows speakers to organize stretches of discourse by placing figures other than the agent in subject position. This may be done to foreground the patient, recipient, or other thematic role; it may also be useful when the semantic patient is the topic of on-going discussion. The passive voice may also be used to avoid specifying the agent of an action.
- Passive voice is a grammatical voice common in many languages. In a clause with passive voice, the grammatical subject expresses the theme or patient of the main verb – that is, the person or thing that undergoes the action or has its state changed. This contrasts with active voice, in which the subject has the agent role. For example, in the passive sentence "The tree was pulled down", the subject (the tree) denotes the patient rather than the agent of the action. In contrast, the sentences "Someone pulled down the tree" and "The tree is down" are active sentences.
2009
- wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
- the voice used to indicate that the grammatical subject of the verb is the recipient (not the source) of the action denoted by the verb; "`The ...
- (Wikipedia, 2009) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_passive_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.). ...