PASSIVE VOICE
Identifying the English Passive
The passive voice is a specific
grammatical construction; not every expression that serves to take focus away
from the performer of an action is classified as an instance of passive voice.
The essential components of the English passive voice are a form of the auxiliary
verb be (or sometimes get, and the past
participle of the main verb denoting the action. For example:
... that all men are created
equal.
We have been cruelly deceived.
The captain was struck by a
missile.
I got kicked in the face
during the fight.
(For exceptions, see Additional
passive constructions below.) The agent (the doer of the action) may be specified,
using a prepositional phrase with the preposition by,
as in the third example, but it is equally possible to omit this, as is done in
the other examples.
A distinction is made between the
above type of clause, and those of similar form in which the past participle is
used as an ordinary adjective, and the verb be or similar is simply a copula linking the subject of the sentence
to that adjective. For example:
I am excited (right now).
This would not normally be classed
as a passive sentence, since the participle excited is used adjectivally
to denote a state, not to denote an action of excitation (as it would in the
passive the electron was excited with a laser pulse). See Stative and
adjectival uses below.
Sentences which do not follow the
pattern described above are not considered to be in the passive voice, even if
they have a similar function of avoiding or marginalizing reference to the
agent. An example is the sentence A stabbing occurred, where mention of
the stabber is avoided, but the sentence is nonetheless cast in the active
voice, with the verbal noun stabbing forming the subject
of the simple past tense of the verb occur. (Similarly There was a
stabbing.) Occasionally, however, writers misapply the term "passive
voice" to sentences of this type. An example of this loose usage can be
found in the following extract from an article from The New
Yorker about Bernard
Madoff (bolding and italics added; bold text indicates the verbs
misidentified as passive voice):
Two sentences later, Madoff said,
"When I began the Ponzi scheme, I believed it would end shortly,
and I would be able to extricate myself, and my clients, from the scheme."
As he read this, he betrayed no sense of how absurd it was to use the
passive voice in regard to his scheme, as if it were a spell of bad weather
that had descended on him . . . In most of the rest of the statement, one not
only heard the aggrieved passive voice, but felt the hand of a lawyer:
"To the best of my recollection, my fraud began in the early
nineteen-nineties." The intransitive verbs would end and began
are in fact in the active voice. Although the speaker uses the words in a
manner that subtly diverts responsibility from him, this is not accomplished by
use of passive voice.
Examples of misuse of the term are
also found in Strunk and White's influential The Elements of Style. Professor Geoffrey
Pullum notes that three out of four "passive voice"
examples given in that book do not in fact contain passives: "There were a
great number of dead leaves lying on the ground" (no sign of any passive);
"It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she
had" (again, no sign of the passive); "The reason that he left
college was that his health became impaired" (here became impaired
is an example of the adjectival, not passive, use of the past participle.
Reason For Using The Passive Voice
The passive voice can be used
without referring to the agent of an action; it may therefore be used when the
agent is unknown or unimportant, or the speaker does not wish to mention the
agent.
Three stores were robbed last night.
(the identity of the agent may be unknown)
- A new cancer drug has been discovered. (the identity of the agent may be unimportant in the context)
- Mistakes have been made on this project. (the speaker may not wish to identify the agent)
The last sentence illustrates a
frequently criticized use of the passive – the evasion of responsibility by
failure to mention the agent (which may even be the speaker himself).
Agentless passives are common in scientific writing, where the agent may be
irrelevant:
- The mixture was heated to 300°C.
However the passive voice can also
be used together with a mention of the agent, using a by-phrase. In this
case the reason for use of the passive is often connected with the positioning
of this phrase at the end of the clause (unlike in the active voice, where the
agent, as subject, normally precedes the verb). Here, in contrast to the
examples above, passive constructions may in fact serve to place emphasis on
the agent, since it is natural for information being emphasized to come at the
end:
- Don't you see? The patient was murdered by his own doctor!
In more technical terms, such uses
can be expected in sentences where the agent is the focus (comment, rheme), while the
patient (the undergoer of the action) is the topic or theme. (see Topic–comment).
There is a tendency for sentences to be formulated so as to place the focus at
the end, and this can motivate the choice of active or passive voice:
- My taxi hit an old lady. (the taxi is the topic, the lady is the focus)
- My mother was hit by a taxi. (the mother is the topic, the taxi is the focus)
Similarly, the passive may be used
because the noun phrase denoting the agent is a long one (containing many modifiers),
since it is convenient to place such phrases at the end of a clause:
- The breakthrough was achieved by Burlingame and Evans, two researchers in the university's genetic engineering lab
