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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 ...
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. Sentences of the second type are called false passives by ...
Mandarin active voice sentences have the same verb phrase structure as English active voice sentences. There is a common active construction in Mandarin called Ba(把) construction: “Ba” is a verb, not a preposition. It is a three-place predicate that subcategorizes for a subject, an object, and a VP complement. [16]
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 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.
In English, intransitive verbs can be used in the passive voice when a prepositional phrase is included, as in, "The houses were lived in by millions of people." Some languages, such as Dutch , have an impersonal passive voice that lets an intransitive verb without a prepositional phrase be passive.
Misconception: The passive voice is incorrect. It is a misconception that the passive voice is always incorrect in English. [21] Some "writing tutors" believe that the passive voice is to be avoided in all cases, [22] but "there are legitimate uses for the passive voice", says Paul Brians. [23]
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.