Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Contemporary style guides discourage excessive use of the passive voice but generally consider it to be acceptable in certain situations, such as when the patient is the topic of the sentence, when the agent is unimportant and therefore omitted, or when the agent is placed near the end of a sentence as a means of emphasis.
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.
They discovered that passive voice in Mandarin is heavily dependent on the context of the sentence rather than the grammatical forms. [18] Therefore, passive voice can be marked (e.g. by the most broadly used passive marker: bèi θΆ« [mentioned above]) or unmarked (see the "Notional passive" section below) in both speech and writing. Those ...
In the sentence "The boy kicked the ball", the boy is the agent and the subject. However, when the sentence is rendered in the passive voice, "The ball was kicked by the boy", the ball is the grammatical subject, but the boy is still the agent. Many sentences in English and other Indo-European languages have the agent as subject.
This can variously have a middle-voice meaning (subject acting onto itself, or for its own benefit) or a passive-voice meaning (something acts onto the subject). An example sentence is El padre se enojó al ver a su hijo romper la lámpara. The English translation is "The father became angry upon seeing his son break the lamp."
The section "The 'divine passive' in theological discourse" seems to me to give undue weight to use of the passive in a single genre. Various genres – natural science writing, political speech, and insincere apologies are three that spring to mind immediately – have been described as using (or over-using) passive voice for particular reasons.
The passive voice in English may appear to be in the OVS order, but that is not an accurate description. In an active voice sentence like Sam ate the apples, the grammatical subject, Sam, is the agent and is acting on the patient, the apples, which are the object of the verb, ate.
The subject of a sentence is generally a noun or pronoun, or a phrase containing a noun or pronoun. If the sentence features active voice, the thing named by the subject carries out the action of the sentence; in the case of passive voice, the subject is affected by the action. In sentences with imperative mood, the subject may not be expressed.