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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.
The uses of these various passive forms are analogous to those of the corresponding tense-aspect-mood combinations in the active voice. The passive forms of certain of the combinations involving the progressive aspect are quite rare; these include the present perfect progressive (it has been being written), past perfect progressive (it had been ...
In the active form, gave is the verb; John is its subject, Mary its indirect object, and a book its direct object. In the passive forms, the indirect object has been promoted and the direct object has been left in place. (In this respect, English resembles secundative languages.)
Thus, turning an active sense of a verb into a passive sense is a valence-decreasing process ("detransitivizing process"), because it syntactically turns a transitive sense into an intransitive sense. [3] This is not always the case; for example in Japanese a passive-voice construction does not necessarily decrease valence. [4]
Active voice is a grammatical voice prevalent in many of the world's languages. It is the default voice for clauses that feature a transitive verb in nominative–accusative languages, including English and most Indo-European languages. In these languages, a verb is typically in the active voice when the subject of the verb is the doer of the ...
Latin deponent verbs can belong to any conjugation. Their form (except in the present and future participle) is that of a passive verb, but the meaning is active. Usually a deponent verb has no corresponding active form, although there are a few, such as vertÅ 'I turn (transitive)' and vertor 'I turn (intransitive)' which have both active and deponent forms.
The base form or plain form of an English verb is not marked by any inflectional ending.. Certain derivational suffixes are frequently used to form verbs, such as -en (sharpen), -ate (formulate), -fy (electrify), and -ise/ize (realise/realize), but verbs with those suffixes are nonetheless considered to be base-form verbs.
The form mindes is usually called passive, but the meaning is medial. The present active minder means "remind(s)". Historically, mindes is a contraction of the active forms and the reflexive pronoun: hun minder sig ("she reminds herself") → hun mindes ("she remembers"). "She" is both the agent and the patient, so the expression works in much ...