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The active voice is the dominant voice used in English. Many commentators, notably George Orwell in his essay "Politics and the English Language" and Strunk & White in The Elements of Style, have urged minimizing use of the passive voice, but this is almost always based on these commentators' misunderstanding of what the passive voice is. [8]
The following pair of examples illustrates the contrast between active and passive voice in English. In sentence (1), the verb form ate is in the active voice, but in sentence (2), the verb form was eaten is in the passive voice. Independent of voice, the cat is the Agent (the doer) of the action of eating in both sentences.
This contrasts with the passive voice, where the subject is the recipient of the action, such as in "The fish was eaten by the cat." The use of both active and passive voices in languages enhances versatility in sentence construction, allowing either the semantic agent or patient to assume the syntactic role of the subject. [2]
Passive writing is not necessarily slack and indirect. Many famously vigorous passages use the passive voice, as in these examples with the passive verbs italicized: Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain. (King James Bible, Isaiah 40:4.)
The active voice (where the verb's subject is understood to denote the doer, or agent, of the denoted action) is the unmarked voice in English. To form the passive voice (where the subject denotes the undergoer, or patient, of the action), a periphrastic construction is used.
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 oranges, the grammatical subject, Sam, is the agent and is acting on the patient, the oranges, which are the object of the verb, ate.
Suicidal ideation (suicidal thoughts) exists on a spectrum: passive and active. Experts say the main difference between passive and active suicidal ideation is the intent and plan that accompanies ...
Reducing valency involves moving an argument from the core to oblique status. This kind of derivation applies most to transitive clauses. Since there are two arguments in a transitive clause, A and P, there are two possibilities for reducing the valency: passive voice and antipassive voice are prototypical valency reducing devices.: [12]: 72 1.
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