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The passive voice is a specific grammatical construction. The essential components, in English, are a form of the stative verb be (or sometimes get [4]) and the past participle of the verb denoting the action.
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 voice can be expressed in combination together with tenses, aspects and moods, by means of appropriate marking of the auxiliary (which for this purpose is not a stative verb, i.e. it has progressive forms available). For example: This room is tidied regularly. (simple present passive) It had already been accepted.
Other verbs end in -ομαι (-omai) or -μαι (-mai) in the 1st person singular of the present tense. These can be either passive or non-passive in meaning. When the meaning of such a verb is not passive, it is known as a "middle voice" verb. Middle voice verbs are usually intransitive, but can also be transitive.
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 ...
Grammatical abbreviations are generally written in full or small caps to visually distinguish them from the translations of lexical words. For instance, capital or small-cap PAST (frequently abbreviated to PST) glosses a grammatical past-tense morpheme, while lower-case 'past' would be a literal translation of a word with that meaning.
The past participle of regular verbs is identical to the preterite (past tense) form, described in the previous section. For irregular verbs, see English irregular verbs. Some of these have different past tense and past participle forms (like sing–sang–sung); others have the same form for both (like make–made–made).
The traditional terms are misleading because the participles do not necessarily correspond to tense: [16] the present participle is often associated with the progressive (continuous) aspect, while the past participle is linked with the perfect aspect or passive voice. See the examples below: