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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.
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 ...
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]
The English passive voice typically involves forms of the verbs to be or to get followed by a passive participle as the subject complement—sometimes referred to as a passive verb. [ 1 ] English allows a number of additional passive constructions that are not possible in many other languages with analogous passive formations to the above.
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.
English past participles have both active and passive uses. In a passive use, an object or preposition complement becomes zero, the gap being understood to be filled by the noun phrase the participle modifies (compare similar uses of the to-infinitive above). Uses of past participles and participial phrases introduced by them are as follows:
Passive income sounds magical, but is it really better than active income? And what exactly is the difference between active and passive income? Discover: 6 Types of Retirement Income That Aren't...
The present active is vi ser (we see); the mediopassive (commonly called passive) form is historically derived thus: de ser sig ("they see themselves") → de ses ("they are seen" or "they see themselves/see each other"). The third person forms have since been generalized by analogy to the first and second person, and as the future progressive ...