Passive voice
Passive voice
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A passive voice construction is a grammatical voice construction that is found in many languages.[1] 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.[2] 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 omitted or is indicated by some adjunct of the clause. Thus, turning an active sense of a verb into a passive sense is a valence-decreasing process ("detransitivizing process"), because it syntactically turns a transitive sense into an intransitive sense.[3] This is not always the case; for example in Japanese a passive-voice construction does not necessarily decrease valence.[4]

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.[5] 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;[5] it may also be useful when the semantic patient is the topic of on-going discussion.[6] The passive voice may also be used to avoid specifying the agent of an action.

Passive marking

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Different languages use various grammatical forms to indicate passive voice.

In some languages, passive voice is indicated by verb conjugation, specific forms of the verb. Examples of languages that indicate voice through conjugation include Greek, Latin, and North Germanic languages such as Swedish.

Voice Latin Swedish Meaning
Passive Vīnum ā servō portātur. Vinet bärs av tjänaren. "The wine is carried by the waiter."
Active Servus vīnum portat. Tjänaren bär vinet. "The waiter carries the wine."

Norwegian (Nynorsk) and Icelandic have a similar system, but the usage of the passive is more restricted. The passive forms in Nynorsk are restricted to being accompanied by an auxiliary verb, which is not the case in Swedish and Danish.

Nynorsk uses "å verte" or "å bli" + past participle for passive voice, and Swedish and Danish use the passive suffix "-s" and Icelandic uses "að verða" or "að vera" + past participle or "-st" suffix for middle voice.[citation needed][7]

In Latin, the agent of a passive sentence (if indicated) is expressed using a noun in the ablative case, in this case servō (the ablative of servus). Different languages use different methods for expressing the agent in passive clauses. In Swedish, the agent can be expressed by means of a prepositional phrase with the preposition av (equivalent here to the English "by").

The Austronesian language Kimaragang Dusun also indicates passive voice by verb conjugation using the infix, ⟨in⟩.[3]

root past passive meaning
patay pinatay "was killed"
nakaw ninakaw "was stolen"
garas ginaras "was butchered"

Other languages, including English, express the passive voice periphrastically, using an auxiliary verb.

In English

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Main article: English passive voice

English, like some other languages, uses a periphrastic passive. Rather than conjugating directly for voice, English uses the past participle form of the verb plus an auxiliary verb, either be or get (called linking verbs in traditional grammar), to indicate passive voice.

  • The money was donated to the school.
  • The vase got broken during the fight.
  • All men are created equal.

If the agent is mentioned, it usually appears in a prepositional phrase introduced by the preposition by.

  • Without agent: The paper was marked.
  • With agent: The paper was marked by Mr. Tan.

The subject of the passive voice usually corresponds to the direct object of the corresponding active-voice formulation (as in the above examples), but English also allows passive constructions in which the subject corresponds to an indirect object or preposition complement:

  • We were given tickets. (subject we corresponds to the indirect object of give)
  • Tim was operated on yesterday. (subject Tim corresponds to the complement of the preposition on)

In sentences of the second type, a stranded preposition is left. This is called the prepositional passive or pseudo-passive (although the latter term can also be used with other meanings).

The active voice is the dominant voice used in English. Many commentators, notably George Orwell in his essay "Politics and the English Language" and Strunk & White in The Elements of Style, have urged minimizing use of the passive voice, but this is almost always based on these commentators' misunderstanding of what the passive voice is.[8] Contrary to common critiques, the passive voice has important uses, with virtually all writers using the passive voice (including Orwell and Strunk & White).[9] There is general agreement that the passive voice is useful for emphasis or when the receiver of the action is more important than the actor.[10]

Merriam–Webster's Dictionary of English Usage refers to three statistical studies of passive versus active sentences in various periodicals, stating: "the highest incidence of passive constructions was 13 percent. Orwell runs to a little over 20 percent in "Politics and the English Language". Clearly he found the construction useful in spite of his advice to avoid it as much as possible".[10]

Defining "passive"

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In the field of linguistics, the term passive is applied to a wide range of grammatical structures. Linguists therefore find it difficult to define the term in a way that makes sense across all human languages. The canonical passive in European languages has the following properties:

  1. The subject is not an agent.
  2. There is a change in: word order; or in nominal morphology—the form of the nouns in the sentence.
  3. There is specific verbal morphology—a particular form of the verb indicates passive voice.

The problem arises with non-European languages. Many constructions in these languages share at least one property with the canonical European passive, but not all. While it seems justified to call these constructions passive when comparing them to European languages' passive constructions, as a whole the passives of the world's languages do not share a single common feature.[1]: 255 

R. M. W. Dixon has defined four criteria for determining whether a construction is a passive:[11]

  1. It applies to underlying transitive clauses and forms a derived intransitive.
  2. The entity that is the patient or the object of the transitive verb in the underlying representation (indicated as O in linguistic terminology) becomes the core argument of the clause (indicated as S, since the core argument is the subject of an intransitive).
  3. The agent in the underlying representation (indicated as A) becomes a chômeur, a noun in the periphery that is not a core argument. It is marked by a non-core case or becomes part of an adpositional phrase, etc. This can be omitted, but there is always the option of including it.
  4. There is some explicit marking of the construction.

Dixon acknowledges that this excludes some constructions labeled as passive by some linguists.[11]

Adversative passive

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In some languages, including several Southeast Asian languages, the passive voice is sometimes used to indicate that an action or event was unpleasant or undesirable.[3] This so-called adversative passive works like the ordinary passive voice in terms of syntactic structure—that is, a theme or instrument acts as subject. In addition, the construction indicates adversative affect, suggesting that someone was negatively affected.

In Japanese, for example, the adversative passive (also called indirect passive) indicates adversative affect. The indirect or adversative passive has the same form as the direct passive. Unlike the direct passive, the indirect passive may be used with intransitive verbs.[12]

花子が

Hanako-ga

Hanako-NOM

隣の

tonari-no

neighbor-GEN

学生に

gakusei-ni

student-DAT

ピアノを

piano-o

piano-ACC

朝まで

asa-made

morning-until

弾かれた。

hika-re-ta.

played-PASS-PFV

花子が 隣の 学生に ピアノを 朝まで 弾かれた。

Hanako-ga tonari-no gakusei-ni piano-o asa-made hika-re-ta.

Hanako-NOM neighbor-GEN student-DAT piano-ACC morning-until played-PASS-PFV

"Hanako was adversely affected by the neighboring student playing the piano until morning."[12]

Yup'ik, from the Eskimo–Aleut family, has two different suffixes that can indicate passive, -cir- and -ma-. The morpheme -cir- has an adversative meaning. If an agent is included in a passive sentence with the -cir passive, the noun is usually in the allative (oblique) case.[13]

neqerrluk yukucirtuq

neqe-rrluk

fish-departed.from.natural.state

yuku-cir-tu-q

be.moldy-get-IND.INTR-3sg

neqe-rrluk yuku-cir-tu-q

fish-departed.from.natural.state be.moldy-get-IND.INTR-3sg

"That beautiful piece of dry fish got moldy."[13]

Stative and dynamic passive

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See also: English passive voice § Stative and adjectival uses

In some languages, for example English, there is often a similarity between clauses expressing an action or event in the passive voice and clauses expressing a state. For example, the string of words "The dog is fed" can have the following two different meanings:

  1. The dog is fed (twice a day).
  2. The dog is fed (so we can leave now).

The additions in parentheses "force" the same string of words to clearly show only one of their two possible grammatical functions and the related meaning. In the first sentence, the combination of the auxiliary verb "is" and the past participle "fed" is a regular example of the construction of the passive voice in English. In the second sentence, "is" can however be interpreted as an ordinary copula and the past participle as an adjective.

Sentences of the second type are called false passives by some linguists, who feel that such sentences are simply confused with the passive voice due to their outward similarity. Other linguists consider the second type to be a different kind of passive – a stative passive (rarely called statal, static, or resultative passive), in contrast to the dynamic or eventive passive illustrated by the first sentence. Some languages express or can express these different meanings using different constructions.

The difference between dynamic and stative passives is more evident in languages such as German that use different words or constructions for the two.[14] In German, the auxiliary verb sein marks static passive (German: Zustandspassiv, rarely statisches Passiv, in referring to German also called sein-Passiv or Sein-Passiv), while werden marks the dynamic passive (Vorgangspassiv or Handlungspassiv, rarely dynamisches Passiv, in referring to German also called werden-Passiv or Werden-Passiv or simply Passiv or Passivum).[15] The English string of words "the lawn is mown" has two possible meanings corresponding to the example "the dog is fed" above. It can be used in the following two different senses:

  1. dynamic: The lawn is mown (once a week).
  2. stative: The lawn is mown (so they're probably not gone.)

German uses two different grammatical constructions for these sentences:

  1. dynamic: Der Rasen wird (einmal pro Woche) gemäht.
  2. stative: Der Rasen ist gemäht (also sind sie wahrscheinlich nicht verreist).[fn 1]

Further examples and explanations:

  1. dynamic: Der Rasen wird (gerade/oft) gemäht ("The lawn is being mown right now" / "The lawn is mown often", literally "The lawn gets mown right now / often", dynamic)
  2. stative: Der Rasen ist (schon) gemäht. ("The lawn is [already] mown.")

A number of German verbs such as bedecken ("cover"), erfüllen ("fill"), and trennen ("separate"), when used as stative verbs, usually only form static passives.

- Schnee bedeckt die Erde ("Snow covers the ground", active)
- Die Erde ist mit Schnee bedeckt ("The ground is covered with snow", static)
- rare, poetic: Die Erde wird durch Schnee bedeckt ("The ground is being covered with snow", dynamic)
- but not: *Die Straße wird mit Trümmern bedeckt. (The English equivalent would be equally incorrect: *"The street is being covered with rubble.")
- correct: Die Straße ist mit Trümmern bedeckt. ("The street is covered with rubble.")[16]

In English, the passive voice expressed with the auxiliary verb "get" rather than "be" ("get-passive") expresses a dynamic rather than a static meaning. But when the auxiliary verb "be" is used, the main verb can have either a dynamic or static meaning as shown below (including copies of some examples from above):

The dog gets fed twice a day. (dynamic)
The dog is fed (twice a day). (dynamic)
The dog is fed (so we can leave now). (stative)
The couple got married last spring. (dynamic)
The marriage was celebrated last spring. (dynamic)
It is agreed that laws were invented for the safety of citizens. (stative)

Verbs that typically express static meaning can show dynamic meaning when used in the passive formed with get, for example be known (static) vs. get known (dynamic):

Zoltan is known for hosting big parties. (static)
Get your foot in the door, get known. (dynamic)[17]

See also

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Footnotes

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References

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Passive voice

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The passive voice is a grammatical voice found in many languages, including English, in which the subject of a sentence receives the action of the verb rather than performing it, shifting focus from the agent to the action or its recipient. In English, passive constructions are typically formed using a conjugated form of the auxiliary verb "to be" followed by the past participle of the main verb, with an optional "by"-phrase to indicate the agent if relevant; for example, "The ball was thrown by the boy." Another example is the active sentence "I follow the European Premier League," whose passive form is "The European Premier League is followed by me." This uses the present tense of "be" (is) + past participle ("followed") + optional "by"-phrase, demonstrating how the auxiliary verb conjugates for tense in periphrastic passives.[1][2] This structure contrasts with the active voice, where the subject acts as the agent, as in "The boy threw the ball."[3][4] Passive voice serves specific rhetorical and discourse functions in English writing and speech, such as emphasizing the patient or result of an action when the agent is unknown, unimportant, or intentionally omitted to avoid assigning blame; it is particularly common in scientific, legal, and formal contexts to maintain objectivity.[5][6] For instance, in academic reports, phrases like "The experiment was conducted" highlight the procedure over the researcher.[1] Despite criticisms that passive voice can obscure clarity or responsibility, it remains a versatile tool for varying sentence structure and focusing on thematic content.[7][4] Cross-linguistically, passive constructions exhibit significant variation, challenging universal definitions and highlighting diverse strategies for demoting or omitting agents, such as intransitivizing the verb or using dedicated auxiliaries.[8] In some languages like German or Latin, passives align closely with English forms, while others, such as certain Austronesian or Native American languages, employ antipassive constructions, the inverse of passives, that promote the agent at the expense of the patient.[9] These variations underscore the passive's role in typology and functional linguistics, where it often correlates with discourse needs like topic prominence or agent defocusing, influencing child language acquisition and translation practices across typologically distinct languages.[10]

Definition and Theoretical Foundations

Defining Passive Voice

In linguistics, the passive voice is a grammatical construction that contrasts with the active voice by restructuring the sentence to promote the patient or theme—the entity affected by the action—as the subject, while the agent—the performer of the action—is demoted to an oblique role or omitted entirely. In the active voice, the agent typically serves as the subject, as in the English sentence "Mary slapped John," where Mary (agent) acts upon John (patient). The corresponding passive construction, "John was slapped (by Mary)," inverts this relationship, making John the subject and optionally including the agent via a preposition like "by." This shift allows speakers to foreground the affected entity or de-emphasize the agent, often for discourse purposes such as focusing on outcomes or when the agent is unknown or irrelevant.[11] The term "passive" traces its origins to classical grammars of ancient Greek, notably the work of Dionysius Thrax in the 2nd century BCE, who categorized verbal diathesis (voice) into active, middle, and passive forms, with the latter linked to the notion of pathos (suffering or being acted upon). This terminology, derived from Greek via Latin passivum, reflects the perceived passivity of the subject in undergoing the action rather than initiating it, influencing subsequent Western grammatical traditions. Dionysius Thrax's framework, preserved in his Technē grammatikē, established voice as a core inflectional category distinguishing how verbs encode participant roles.[12] Key characteristics of the passive voice include valence reduction, where a transitive verb (requiring both agent and patient) becomes intransitive by suppressing one argument; subject-object inversion, elevating the original object to subject position; and agent suppression, which backgrounds or eliminates the agent to alter prominence. These features distinguish the passive as a syntactic operation that maintains the verb's semantic content while adjusting argument structure, as seen in the English example "The ball was kicked by the boy," where "the ball" (patient) assumes subject status, and the agent "the boy" is optional. Such properties enable functional flexibility in sentence organization across languages, though precise identification can vary due to cross-linguistic differences in morphology and syntax.[11]

Criteria for Cross-Linguistic Identification

Linguists employ formal criteria to identify passive constructions across languages, aiming to distinguish them from superficially similar structures while accounting for typological diversity. One influential set of criteria comes from R.M.W. Dixon, who outlines four properties that characterize prototypical passives: (1) the construction applies to an underlying transitive clause to derive an intransitive one; (2) the subject of the passive corresponds to the object of the transitive; (3) there is no core argument corresponding to the transitive subject (agent), or it appears in an oblique phrase; and (4) the passive retains the same tense, aspect, and modality as the active counterpart.[13] These criteria emphasize syntactic derivation and argument restructuring, providing a baseline for cross-linguistic comparison. Definitional challenges arise in debates over the inclusivity of passive-like constructions, particularly in functionalist theories that prioritize semantic and pragmatic roles over strict syntactic rules. For instance, some scholars argue that antipassives—constructions that demote the patient and promote the agent, common in ergative languages—do not qualify as passives due to their inverse argument mapping, while others advocate broader categorization if they serve similar valency-reducing functions.[14] Similarly, middle voice forms, which often express reflexivity or spontaneity without an external agent, are contested: functionalists may include them as extended passives for their shared emphasis on affectedness, but structuralists exclude them for lacking true patient-subject promotion.[14] These debates highlight tensions between prototype-based and rule-governed approaches to voice identification. In generative grammar, particularly Chomsky's Minimalist Program, passivization is analyzed as an instance of A-movement, where the internal argument (patient) moves to the subject position to check case and satisfy the Extended Projection Principle (EPP), while the external argument (agent) is suppressed via little-v or Voice head properties. This perspective treats passive as a parametric variation in argument licensing, derivable from universal computational principles rather than language-specific rules, offering insights into why passives universally promote patients but vary in agent expression. Borderline cases further complicate identification, such as nominalizations that mimic passives by placing the patient in subject-like position without verbal inflection or tense marking. For example, constructions resembling "the destruction of the city by the army" may be analyzed as nominal rather than passive if they lack verbal agreement or adverbial modification typical of clausal passives, underscoring the need to test for derivational status from transitive verbs.[14] Such distinctions clarify boundaries by prioritizing syntactic and morphological evidence over semantic resemblance alone.

Formation of Passive Constructions

Morphological Marking

Morphological passives are grammatical constructions in which the passive voice is formed through inflectional changes to the verb stem, such as the addition of affixes, internal stem modifications, or dedicated passive verb paradigms, typically found in synthetic languages where morphology encodes voice distinctions compactly within a single word.[15] In fusional languages like Latin, passive voice is realized through specialized conjugational endings that differ from active forms; for instance, the active verb amāre ('to love') yields the present passive indicative amātur ('is loved') in the third person singular, marked by the characteristic -tur ending in the present system and synthetic forms across tenses.[15] Sanskrit, another fusional Indo-European language, employs middle voice derivations for passive functions, often syncretic with the middle paradigm, where verbs like kṛ ('do/make') form passives such as kṛyate ('is done/made') via suffixation of -ya- and middle endings, distinguishing it from the active karoti.[16] In agglutinative languages such as Turkish, passive morphology involves dedicated suffixes added to the verb stem; the passive marker appears as -(I)l after consonants (e.g., kapat-ıl-dı 'the door was closed' from kapat- 'close'), -n after vowels, or -(I)n after laterals, with vowel harmony ensuring phonological integration.[17] Historically, languages like Old English exhibited a transition from more synthetic passive forms inherited from Proto-Indo-European middle voice inflections—such as weak verb paradigms with passive-like meanings—to predominantly periphrastic constructions by the Middle English period, contrasting with the retention of robust morphological passives in modern synthetic languages like Turkish.[18] Morphological marking offers the advantage of conciseness, allowing voice alternations to be expressed within a single inflected word without additional auxiliaries, but it is limited to transitive verbs that possess compatible morphological paradigms and requires clear, often irregular, inflectional systems that may not extend to all lexical items.[15] This synthetic approach differs from analytic passives that rely on multi-word combinations.[19]

Periphrastic and Analytic Marking

Periphrastic passive constructions form the passive voice through the combination of an auxiliary verb and a non-finite form of the main verb, typically the past participle, allowing for the demotion of the agent and promotion of the patient to subject position without relying on inflectional morphology.[11] This analytic approach contrasts with morphological passives by employing multi-word structures that provide flexibility in tense, aspect, and mood marking through the auxiliary.[11] In many languages, such constructions evolved to express passivization in systems where verbal inflection is limited or absent. In English, the standard periphrastic passive uses the auxiliary "be" conjugated for tense, followed by the past participle of the main verb, as in "The letter was written by John," where the patient "the letter" becomes the subject and the agent is optionally expressed via the preposition "by."[11] A variant, the "get"-passive, substitutes "get" for "be" to convey dynamic or resultative events, often with an adverse connotation, as in "The car got damaged in the accident," emphasizing change of state over a static result.[20] German employs "werden" as the auxiliary plus the past participle, forming constructions like "Das Buch wurde von dem Autor geschrieben" (The book was written by the author), where "werden" highlights the processual aspect of the event.[21] French utilizes "être" as the auxiliary with the past participle, agreeing in gender and number with the subject, as in "La lettre a été écrite par Jean" (The letter was written by John), integrating passive formation with the language's agreement system while maintaining analytic structure.[22] In Mandarin Chinese, an isolating language, the analytic "bei" construction functions as a periphrastic passive marker, placing "bei" before the agent and verb, as in "Tā bèi wǒ dǎ le" (He was hit by me), where "bei" signals the passive without morphological alteration of the verb.[23] The expression of the agent in these periphrastic passives typically involves prepositional phrases or particles equivalent to "by," such as "von" in German ("Das Haus wurde von den Arbeitern gebaut" – The house was built by the workers), "par" in French, or "ni" in Japanese passives, which marks the agent in constructions like "Hon ga sakusha ni kakareta" (The book was written by the author).[24] This analytic marking of the agent allows for optional inclusion, enhancing discourse flexibility across languages. In isolating languages like Mandarin and Vietnamese, periphrastic passives using particles such as "bei" or "bị" compensate for the absence of inflectional morphology, enabling passivization through word order and functional markers that evolved from dispositional verbs.[23] Similarly, in creole languages, which often feature reduced morphology due to their contact origins, periphrastic passives develop from superstrate auxiliaries or particles to fulfill valency-reducing functions; for instance, Papiamentu employs a "lo" or "a wordu" construction akin to Dutch-influenced periphrasis, as in "E libro a wordu skribí" (The book was written), adapting analytic strategies to express passives without synthetic forms.[25] This evolution underscores how periphrastic marking arises in low-morphology systems to maintain expressive parallelism with active counterparts.[25]

Types of Passive Constructions

Dynamic and Stative Passives

Dynamic passives, also known as eventive or verbal passives, describe actions or processes involving an event, where the patient of the action becomes the subject and the agent may be optionally expressed. For instance, in English, the sentence "The window was broken by the child" portrays the breaking as an ongoing or completed process, emphasizing the event itself.[26][11] In contrast, stative passives, often termed adjectival passives, express the resulting state or condition after an event, without focusing on the action or agent. A classic example is the German construction "Das Fenster ist gebrochen," which translates to "The window is broken" and highlights the current state rather than the process of breaking.[26][27] Semantic distinctions between dynamic and stative passives can be tested through adverb compatibility and aspectual behavior. Dynamic passives are compatible with manner or process-oriented adverbs, such as "The window was deliberately broken," indicating an event with intentionality, whereas stative passives reject such adverbs, as in the infelicitous "*The window is deliberately broken." Aspectually, dynamic passives align with progressive or perfective forms (e.g., English "The window was being broken"), underscoring change, while stative passives favor neutral or resultative aspects without implying ongoing activity.[26][28] These constructions are particularly prevalent in Germanic languages like English and German, where distinct auxiliaries (e.g., "werden" for dynamic vs. "sein" for stative in German) facilitate clear differentiation. In Romance languages, such as French, stative interpretations are common but often realized through adjectival predicates rather than dedicated passive forms, making explicit dynamic-stative contrasts rarer.[11][26]

Adversative and Affective Passives

Adversative passives represent a specialized subtype of passive constructions that encode not only the promotion of the patient to subject but also an implication of misfortune, unwanted interference, or negative impact on the subject. Unlike standard passives, which primarily serve structural purposes such as agent demotion, adversative variants introduce a conventionalized semantic layer of adversity, often arising from cultural and pragmatic conventions in the language. This connotation distinguishes them by emphasizing the subject's lack of control or suffering, frequently in contexts of social interaction or unexpected events.[29] In Japanese, the indirect passive—formed with the suffix -(r)are on transitive verbs—exemplifies adversative passives, where the subject undergoes an adverse effect from an agent's action, even if the subject is not the direct patient. For instance, the sentence Tarō-ni piano-o hik-are-ta translates to "Taro was made to play the piano," implying the event occurred against Tarō's will or to his detriment, such as wasting his time or causing annoyance. This construction is distinct from direct passives, which lack the adversative implicature and focus solely on the patient's promotion, as the indirect variant allows a non-patient experiencer subject and conveys a triadic relation of "lack of control" over the event. The adversative meaning emerges as a conversational implicature in indirect passives, tied to pragmatic inferences rather than strict semantics, and is avoided in positive or neutral contexts.[29][30] Korean morphological passives, marked by suffixes such as -i, -hi, -li, or -ki, similarly carry an inherent adversative flavor, particularly in affected experiencer constructions where the subject suffers negative consequences from the event. An example is Inho-ka kay-hanthey tali-lul mul-li-ess-ta ("Inho got his leg bitten by the dog"), which not only inverts the active structure but also implicates misfortune or harm to Inho, often as a conventional implicature unless the subject is inanimate. These passives are semantically monostratal, restricting adversity to transitive verbs and requiring direct involvement (e.g., possession) for possessive variants, differing from Japanese by embedding the adversative sense more directly into the construction's core meaning rather than as a cancellable implicature. Additionally, Korean employs periphrastic "suffer" constructions with light verbs like dangha- ("suffer") or suffixes such as -eci- in contexts implying endurance of hardship, as in John-i piano-rul chi-eci-ess-ta ("John suffered playing the piano"), heightening the affective negativity on the subject.[29][31][32] Affective passives, a related variant, further emphasize emotional or experiential impact, often highlighting the subject's vulnerability in non-Indo-European languages. In Central Alaskan Yup'ik, an Eskimo-Aleut language, certain applicative constructions function analogously to adversative passives, promoting an experiencer subject while implying negative affect from an unspecified or oblique agent, as in derivations that convey undergoing an unwanted process. These structures align with broader antipassive uses in Yup'ik that carry adversative connotations, reducing agentivity to underscore misfortune without a full passive morphology.[33] In East Asian languages like Japanese and Korean, adversative and affective passives play key cultural and pragmatic roles, often interfacing with honorific systems to express politeness, sympathy, or indirect complaint without directly blaming the agent. For example, using an adversative passive can soften criticism in social discourse, aligning with collectivist norms that prioritize relational harmony over explicit confrontation. This pragmatic utility extends the constructions beyond mere valence reduction, embedding them in politeness strategies where the misfortune layer mitigates face-threatening acts. In Yup'ik, similar affective nuances support communal storytelling, emphasizing shared vulnerability in narratives of hardship. These roles underscore how adversative passives transcend structural inversion to convey nuanced interpersonal dynamics.[29][34]

Cross-Linguistic Variations

In Indo-European Languages

In Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the middle voice served as the primary precursor to passive constructions, encoding passivity through inflectional endings without dedicated passive markers; the initial direct object of an active verb became the subject in this middle passive pattern.[35] This system evolved into synthetic forms in ancient Indo-European languages, where the middle inflection persisted for passive functions in branches like Greek (e.g., tetímētai "has been honored" from Homeric Greek) and Indo-Aryan (e.g., Vedic pū-ya-te "is purified" using the -yá- suffix alongside middle endings).[35] Shared proto-features included a two-way active-middle opposition and nominal forms like -to-/-no-* participles, but divergences arose in specialization: Greek retained syncretic middle forms for passives across tenses, while Indo-Iranian developed anti-syncretic derivational morphology for present passives.[36] Within the Germanic branch, passive constructions predominantly employ periphrastic strategies, as seen in English ("The book is read") and German ("Das Buch wird gelesen"), where auxiliaries like "be" or "become" combine with a past participle to suppress the external argument.[37] This analytic dominance reflects a broader shift from PIE synthetic middles, with participles identical to those in perfect constructions but agreeing in case, number, and gender with the subject.[37] Exceptions persist in Icelandic, which retains synthetic passives through morphological markers such as the -st ending (e.g., bókin er lesin evolving into synthetic forms like lesast), preserving residual traits from earlier Germanic stages unlike the fully periphrastic Mainland Scandinavian languages.[37] Romance languages derive their analytic passives from Latin periphrastic models involving the copula esse ("to be") plus a past participle, a pattern fully grammaticalized in modern forms like Spanish ser + participle (e.g., La casa es construida "The house is built," where the participle agrees in gender and number with the subject).[36] This construction emphasizes the patient as subject and optionally includes an agent with por (e.g., por los obreros "by the workers").[36] For middle functions, Romance employs se-passives, which syncretize reflexive, anticausative, and passive meanings (e.g., Spanish Se vende la casa "The house is sold" or "sells itself"), diverging from Latin's more distinct middle-passive uses while inheriting the periphrastic backbone.[36] In Slavic languages, reflexive passives utilize clitic elements like Polish się or East Slavic -sja to form impersonal constructions that convey passivity without dedicated morphology (e.g., Polish Książka jest czytana "The book is being read," where się forms impersonals like Czyta się książkę; though by-phrases are restricted in West Slavic).[38] East Slavic and Bulgarian allow agentive by-phrases more freely (e.g., Russian Dom stroitsja rabotnikami "The house is being built by workers"), reflecting multifunctional -sja that also marks reflexives and anticausatives.[38] Greek exhibits mediopassive syncretism through non-active morphology (NACT), merging middle and passive voices in a single paradigm (e.g., kathoristike "was accused," licensing apo "by" phrases), a retention of PIE middle traits adapted to express both agentless passives and subject-oriented middles.[38] Recent analyses of Norwegian and Icelandic conjugations highlight residual synthetic traits, such as the -s suffix in Norwegian present-tense passives (e.g., boken leses "the book is read"), which coexists with periphrastic forms and echoes PIE middles more than in other Mainland Scandinavian varieties.[39] In Icelandic, these synthetic elements appear in the "new passive" or impersonal constructions, showing ongoing diachronic tension between synthetic inheritance and analytic innovation.[40]

In Non-Indo-European Languages

In non-Indo-European languages, passive constructions exhibit diverse morphological and syntactic strategies that often deviate from the periphrastic patterns common in Indo-European families, emphasizing patient prominence through affixes, prefixes, or voice alternations rather than auxiliary verbs. These structures frequently integrate with broader voice systems, such as focus or applicative marking, to demote agents or elevate patients without fully suppressing transitivity. Examples from Austronesian, Sino-Tibetan, Uto-Aztecan, Niger-Congo, and Athabaskan languages illustrate this variability, highlighting how passives adapt to typological features like agglutination and animacy hierarchies. In Austronesian languages like Kimaragang Dusun, a Dusunic language spoken in Sabah, Malaysia, patient-focus constructions function analogously to passives through voice-marking affixes that promote the undergoer (patient) to subject position. The objective voice affix -on marks the patient as subject, while transitivity prefixes like poN- indicate the undergoer's role when it is not the subject, allowing the agent to remain a core argument rather than being fully demoted to an oblique. For instance, in lapak-on ku do kapak ilo’ niyuw ku ("I split the coconut with my axe"), the patient "coconut" is the subject, with the agent "I" as a genitive phrase and the instrument oblique—contrasting with actor voice m-lapak where the agent is subject. This symmetric voice system, unlike canonical passives, treats the patient and agent as equally eligible for subjecthood, blending focus marking with valency adjustments.[41] Sino-Tibetan languages, exemplified by Mandarin Chinese, employ analytic constructions for passive-like functions, but these often retain partial agent visibility and carry dispositional semantics. The bei construction serves as a primary passive marker, where bei introduces a demoted agent or is omitted, focusing on the patient as subject; it is analyzed as a preposition or passivization morpheme that applies to verb phrases, enabling broader syntactic scope than English be-passives. An example is tā bèi tā dǎ-le ("He was hit by him"), where the agent follows bei optionally, and the construction conveys adversity or affectedness without full agent suppression. In contrast, the ba construction, a disposal form, promotes the patient to a preverbal object position to highlight its affectedness by the agent-subject, as in tā bǎ shū mài-le ("He sold the book"), where the agent remains prominent and no agent demotion occurs—distinguishing it from true passives like bei. These structures lack the agent-by-phrase typical of Indo-European passives, prioritizing pragmatic disposal over strict valency reduction.[42] Alternative passive markers are used in colloquial Mandarin Chinese:
  • 让 (ràng) and 叫 (jiào): These are primarily colloquial and spoken forms. They usually require an explicit agent and often carry causative or unexpected connotations (e.g., 钱包让小偷偷走了。Qiánbāo ràng xiǎotōu tōu zǒu le. "The wallet was stolen by the thief.").
  • 给 (gěi): This serves as a colloquial reinforcer, either replacing 被 or combining with it (e.g., 饮料被孩子给喝光了。Yǐnliào bèi háizi gěi hē guāng le. "The drink was drunk up by the child."). It is more common in southern Chinese varieties.
In formal writing, such as news reports or academic texts, 被 is preferred for its neutrality and objectivity (e.g., 嫌疑人被警方逮捕。Xiányírén bèi jǐngfāng dàibǔ. "The suspect was arrested by the police."). Overuse of 被, especially without resultative complements or in long chains, often sounds unnatural or overly stiff to native speakers. Natives tend to use passives sparingly, favoring active voice or topic-comment structures for smoother discourse flow. Excessive 被 usage is a common marker of non-native style. Vietnamese learners often transfer patterns from L1 passives: bị for adverse/negative events and được for positive/benefactive ones. This leads to common errors, such as overgeneralizing negativity to neutral 被 sentences, omitting required verb complements, or misusing colloquial alternatives in formal contexts. Mastery of these distinctions is important for HSK levels 5-6, where learners need to read and understand formal texts and produce natural essays or summaries. The 2026 rollout of HSK 3.0 emphasizes natural productive output and pragmatic usage over rote pattern memorization. Uto-Aztecan languages such as Hopi utilize morphological suffixes to form passives from intransitive or transitive bases, promoting patients directly without auxiliaries and incorporating applicative-like extensions to foreground oblique roles. The passive suffix -ti (or variants like -?y- or -ni) iotizes the root vowel and derives a patient-subject construction, often implying external causation; for example, la’qakna-ti ("is pulled") from a transitive base elevates the theme to subject while suppressing the agent. In applicative passives, suffixes extend valency to include beneficiaries or instruments as promoted arguments, as seen in forms where a patient is foregrounded alongside an applicative morpheme, blending promotion with added semantic roles—e.g., derivations from non-transitive bases like "singing" to "it is sung" via suffixation. This system contrasts with periphrastic passives by relying on agglutinative morphology to achieve patient focus.[43][44] In Niger-Congo languages like Swahili, an Eastern Bantu language, passives are formed morphologically with the suffix -w-a (or variants -liw-a, -lew-a depending on the verb root), which promotes the object to subject position while optionally prefixing it via agreement markers. The construction demotes the agent to a prepositional phrase with na ("by") or omits it entirely; for example, active ni-na-ku-amb-i-a ("I tell you") becomes passive u-na-ambiw-a ("You are told"), where the former object "you" is now the prefixed subject. This blends with applicative extensions like -il-, allowing passives to incorporate beneficiaries or instruments as core arguments, as in combined forms where the promoted patient co-occurs with applicative morphology—enhancing discourse flexibility in transitive contexts. Such prefixing integrates passive formation with the language's noun-class agreement system.[45] Athabaskan languages, including Navajo, feature an inverse voice system that resembles passives through prefix alternation, particularly in transitive clauses with third-person arguments, where the patient is topicalized without full transitivity loss. The yi-/bi- alternation marks direct (yi-, agent-topic) versus inverse (bi-, patient-topic) voice; for instance, yi-st’aal ("s/he kicked it," agent prominent) contrasts with bi-st’aal ("it was kicked by her/him," patient prominent), demoting the agent to a non-subject role while respecting an animacy hierarchy (higher animacy prefers direct voice). This inverse construction, unlike canonical passives, maintains transitivity and uses possessor-like bi- to indicate patient focus, often in contexts of lower agent animacy or discourse patient salience—providing a passive-like effect in verb-complex morphology.[46]

Functions and Discourse Roles

Semantic and Valency Functions

The passive construction reduces the syntactic valency of a transitive verb, shifting it from bivalent (requiring both an agent and a patient) to monovalent (with only the patient as the core argument), while the agent is demoted to an optional oblique phrase or entirely omitted. This valency decrease aligns with broader voice alternations in linguistics, where the passive prototypically lowers the number of core arguments by one, as seen in English constructions like "The book was read (by the student)," where the verb no longer obligatorily selects a subject agent.[47] Semantically, this valency reduction involves a reconfiguration of thematic roles, or theta-roles, promoting the patient or theme from direct object to subject position, thereby inverting the typical agent-subject mapping. The agent theta-role, originally external and associated with volition or causation, is suppressed in the core structure but can be expressed obliquely, allowing for indefinite or unknown agents to be backgrounded. For instance, in "Mistakes were made," the passive omits the agent entirely, emphasizing the theme (mistakes) and enabling a focus on the event's outcome without specifying the doer, which enhances semantic flexibility in expressing affectedness or result.[48][49] In valency frameworks, the passive interacts with other detransitivizing voices like the middle and antipassive, though it differs in its thematic promotion patterns. The middle voice similarly reduces valency but typically excludes agentive obliques, encoding self-directed or spontaneous events (e.g., "The window broke" as anticausative), rooted in the subject's inherent involvement rather than external agency. By contrast, the antipassive—common in ergative languages—demotes the patient to oblique status, retaining the agent as the sole core argument and thus inverting the passive's patient-focus, as in Chukchi examples where the construction absorbs the patient's case to lower valency. These relations highlight the passive's role in a spectrum of voice operations that modulate argument prominence without altering the underlying event semantics.[50][51] Theoretical models in lexical semantics further elucidate the passive's valency functions by linking passivization to verb-specific semantic classes and alternations. Beth Levin's framework classifies over 3,000 English verbs into semantically coherent classes based on shared theta-role assignments and participation in syntactic alternations, revealing that passivization is licensed for verbs whose semantics permit patient promotion, such as those involving caused motion (e.g., "The package was shipped") or state change (e.g., "The door was opened"), but restricted for unaccusatives or psych-verbs lacking an external agent role. This approach underscores how lexical properties govern valency shifts, ensuring passives preserve core event meaning while adapting argument structure to discourse needs.[52]

Stylistic and Pragmatic Usage

In discourse, the passive voice facilitates topic continuity by allowing the patient or theme of an action to become the subject, thereby maintaining focus on ongoing themes while introducing new information about the agent only when relevant. This mechanism enhances textual cohesion, particularly in narratives or expository texts where the discourse topic persists across clauses. For instance, in a sequence describing events, a passive construction like "The village was destroyed" can shift emphasis to the affected entity without disrupting the flow from prior mentions of the location.[53] In scientific writing, the passive voice promotes objectivity by de-emphasizing the researcher as agent and centering the process or results, aligning with conventions that prioritize impersonal reporting. This stylistic choice is evident in methodologies where actions like "The solution was heated to 100°C" foreground the procedure over the performer, fostering a sense of detachment and universality. However, guidelines such as those from the American Psychological Association advocate balanced use, recognizing passives' role in clarity while cautioning against overuse that obscures agency.[4] Stylistic preferences for the passive vary by genre, with critiques often targeting its perceived vagueness in general prose. In The Elements of Style, Strunk and White express strong disapproval, labeling excessive passives as a hallmark of weak writing that dilutes vigor and directness. Conversely, legal and technical texts embrace passives for their utility in focusing on outcomes or obligations without specifying actors, as seen in contracts where "The payment shall be made" ensures neutrality. A NASA analysis of technical reports similarly defends passives, noting their prevalence (e.g., 56% exclusive use in some analyses of NASA reports) for precision in describing systems and procedures.[54] Pragmatically, omitting the agent in passives enables neutrality or evasion, particularly in sensitive contexts like politics. The phrase "Mistakes were made," famously used by figures such as President Reagan in 1987, exemplifies this by acknowledging errors without assigning blame, thereby softening accountability. This construction shifts responsibility diffusely, a tactic noted in rhetorical analyses of public discourse.[55] In modern computational linguistics, passive detection has advanced through natural language processing tools, aiding text generation and style analysis in AI systems. Post-2023 developments include PassivePy, a Python-based tool that employs dependency parsing to identify passives in large corpora with high accuracy (98% agreement with human-coded data), outperforming prior rule-based methods. Surveys of large language models examine stylistic features in generated text, informing techniques for controllable output in applications like summarization. These innovations build on semantic valency shifts by enabling automated rewriting between active and passive forms.[56][57]

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  56. A Survey on LLM-Generated Text Detection: Necessity, Methods ...
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