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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]
Passive marker is excluded in notional passive because the sentence relies on the hearer's common sense or their knowledge of the world. Thus, this passive voice is expressed implicitly. Furthermore, notional passive sentences can be representing either positive or negative meanings. Here is an example of notional passive:
The first sentence is an example of the canonical English passive as described above. However the second case is distinct; such sentences are not passive voice, because the participle is being used adjectivally; [ 12 ] Such constructs are sometimes called "false passives" or stative passives (rarely called statal , static , or resultative ...
The impersonal passive voice is a verb voice that decreases the valency of an intransitive verb (which has valency one) to zero. [1]: 77 The impersonal passive deletes the subject of an intransitive verb. In place of the verb's subject, the construction instead may include a syntactic placeholder, also called a dummy. This placeholder has ...
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 ...
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 mediopassive is found in some contemporary Scandinavian languages like Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian (whereas for example Icelandic keeps up a formal distinction between the middle and the passive). The examples below are from Danish, but the situation is the same in Swedish and Norwegian. The passive use of the Danish mediopassive is ...
Passive: The books were given to him by Jean. He was given the books by Jean. Not all languages have a passive voice, and some that do have one (e.g. Polish) do not allow the indirect object of a ditransitive verb to be promoted to subject by passivization, as English does. In others like Dutch a passivization is possible but requires a ...