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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 .
Passives mark this voice in English syntactically as well, which often involves subject–object inversion and the use of 'by'. Sentence (2) is an example of passive voice, where something (the castles) has been (notionally) acted upon by someone (Roger Bigod). (2) The castles were seen by Roger Bigod.
Occasionally, authors express recommendations about use of the passive unclearly or misapply the term "passive voice" to include sentences of this type. [6] An example of this incorrect 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 ...
In the following example from Dutch, the verb is unergative, describing a voluntary action, and can be made passive: Er wordt hier veel geskied. "A lot of skiing is done here." (lit. "it is skied much here") But a sentence with an unaccusative verb, such as "The concert lasted a long time", cannot be made passive.
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 is normally expressed with a form of the copula verb be (or sometimes get) together with the past participle of the main verb. In this context be is not a stative verb, so it may occur in progressive forms. Examples: The house was built last year. The house is being built at the moment. The house will be built by ...
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 passive voice is formed using the verb be (in the appropriate tense or form) with the past participle of the verb in question: cars are driven, he was killed, I am being tickled, it is nice to be pampered, etc. The performer of the action may be introduced in a prepositional phrase with by (as in they were killed by the invaders).