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The English passive voice typically involves forms of the verbs to be or to get followed by a passive participle as the subject complement—sometimes referred to as a passive verb. [ 1 ] English allows a number of additional passive constructions that are not possible in many other languages with analogous passive formations to the above.
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]
The usual passive voice is the se pasiva, in which the verb is conjugated in the active voice, but preceded by the se particle: La puerta se abre. La puerta se cierra. Estar is used to form what might be termed a static passive voice (not regarded as a passive voice in traditional Spanish grammar; it describes a state that is the result of an ...
In an active voice sentence like Sam ate the oranges, the grammatical subject, Sam, is the agent and is acting on the patient, the oranges, which are the object of the verb, ate. In the passive voice, The oranges were eaten by Sam , the order is reversed and so that patient is followed by the verb and then the agent.
The voice [13] of a verb expresses whether the subject of the verb is performing the action of the verb or whether the action is being performed on the subject. The two most common voices are the active voice (as in "I saw the car") and the passive voice (as in "The car was seen by me" or simply "The car was seen").
In English, the similarity between the active past tense form of verbs (i.e., "John kicked the ball") and the passive past tense (i.e., "the ball was kicked") can give rise to confusion concerning a special form of reduced relative clause, called the reduced object relative passive clause [5] (so called because the noun being modified is the ...
Beyond that ambiguity, the sentence quoted above says that common critiques of the use of the passive voice in English have included the claim that the passive voice does not have important uses (along with the implication that either those same critiques, or Orwell and Strunk & White, or all of them, have claimed that a writer might write in ...
Passive voice, a grammatical voice common in many languages, see also Pseudopassive; Passive language, a language from which an interpreter works; Passivity (behavior), the condition of submitting to the influence of one's superior; Passive-aggressive behavior, resistance to following through with expectations in interpersonal or occupational ...