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Numerous Language Log posts by me, Mark Liberman, and Arnold Zwicky among others have been devoted to mocking people who denigrate the passive without being able to identify it (see this comprehensive list of Language Log posts about the passive). It is clear that some people think The bus blew up is in the passive; that The case took on racial overtones is in the passive; that Dr. Reuben deeply regrets that this happened is in the passive; and so on.
Our grumbling about how these people don't know their passive from a hole in the ground has inspired many people to send us email asking for a clear and simple explanation of what a passive clause is. In this post I respond to those many requests. I'll make it as clear and simple as I can, but it will be a 2500-word essay; I can't make things simpler than they are. There is no hope of figuring out the meaning of grammatical terms from common sense, or by looking in a dictionary. Passive (like its opposite, active) is a technical term. Its use in syntax has nothing to do with lacking energy or initiative, or assuming a receptive and non-directive role. And the dictionary definitions are often utterly inadequate (Webster's, for example, is simply hopeless on the grammatical sense of the word). I will try to explain things accurately, and also simply (though this is not for kids; I am writing this for grownups). If I fail, then of course the whole of your money will be refunded.
I won't be talking about passive sentences or passive verbs: sentences are too big and verbs are too small. I'll talk in terms of passive clauses. A clause consists, very roughly, of a verb plus all the appropriate things that go with that verb to complete a unit that can express a proposition, including all its optional extra modifiers. Sentences can contain numerous clauses, some passive and some not, some embedded inside others, so talking about passive sentences doesn't make any sense. Nor does "passive construction" if you define it, as Webster's does, as a type of expression "containing a passive verb form". That would be far too vague even if English had passive verb forms (in reality, it doesn't).
This essay avoids using the term voice. That's the rather strange traditional name for the distinction between active and passive. It mainly confuses people: The active/passive "voice" contrast has nothing to do with finding your voice, or having a loud voice, or the authentic voice of the oppressed.
I'll need to use three abbreviations: a noun-phrase like a storm, or storms, or the roof, or City Hall, will be referred to as an NP. A verb-phrase like blew in, or damaged the roof, will be called a VP And a preposition-phrase like with the others, or by a bear, will be called a PP.
Fasten your seatbelt; here we go. Ten short sections follow. You can ignore the footnotes at the end of section 7 without much loss.
1. English has a contrast between kinds of clause in which one kind has the standard correspondence between grammatical subject and semantic roles (when a verb denotes an action, the subject standardly corresponds to the agent), and the other switches those roles around. In the kind of clause called passive some non-subject NP you would expect within the VP is missing, and that VP is understood with that NP as its subject.
Take the verb damage as an example. Active uses of it involve a subject NP denoting a causer or initiator of damage — call that participant the wrecker. Since damage is a transitive verb, there is also a direct object NP. In this case it denotes something that suffers or undergoes damage; call that entity the victim. An active clause with the verb damage would be something like Storms damaged City Hall. Notice that the subject NP (storms) denotes the wrecker. In a passive use of damage (I won't give one just yet, but I will in a minute) you would see a form of the verb damage used in such a way that the subject of the clause does not denote the wrecker, but denotes the victim instead.
(What about the NP that denotes the wrecker, then? As we'll see, it doesn't have to be expressed at all in a passive clause. But if it is expressed, it is put into a PP inside the VP. That PP has the head preposition by. You would add by storms, for example, to make it explicit what the agent was in a passive clause using damaged.)
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