Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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]
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 sentences have a passive marker called the long passive, while the ones that do not require a passive marker are called short passive.
The English passive voice is used less often than the active voice, [3] but frequency varies according to the writer's style and the given field of writing. 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 ...
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 ...
A formal grammar describes which strings from an alphabet of a formal language are valid according to the language's syntax. A grammar does not describe the meaning of the strings or what can be done with them in whatever context—only their form. A formal grammar is defined as a set of production rules for such strings in a formal language.
For this reason, it is difficult to portray double negatives in writing as the level of intonation to add weight in one's speech is lost. A double negative intensifier does not necessarily require the prescribed steps, and can easily be ascertained by the mood or intonation of the speaker. Compare There isn't no other way. = There's some other way.
Passive fluency is often brought about by being raised in one language (which becomes the person's passive language) and being schooled in another language (which becomes the person's native language). [2] [3] Such speakers are especially common in language shift communities where speakers of a declining language do not acquire active competence.
Writing advice sometimes focuses on avoiding overuse of nominalization. Texts that contain a high level of nominalized words can be dense, [4] but these nominalized forms can also be useful for fitting a larger volume of information into smaller sentences. [5] Often, using an active verb (rather than a nominalized verb) is the most direct ...