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A bare passive clause is similar to a typical passive clause, but without the passive auxiliary verb (so it is a non-finite clause consisting of a subject together with a verb phrase based on a past participle with the passive construction). These can be used in such contexts as newspaper headlines:
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.
For example, the verb eiti ("to go, to walk") has the active participle forms einąs/einantis ("going, walking", present tense), ėjęs (past tense), eisiąs (future tense), eidavęs (past frequentative tense), the passive participle forms einamas ("being walked", present tense), eitas ("walked" past tense), eisimas (future tense), the ...
Specifically, it is made up of a form of the auxiliary verb to be and a past participle of the main verb which carries the lexical content of the predicate. In other languages, such as Latin , the passive voice for some tenses is simply marked on the verb by inflection : librum legit "He reads the book"; liber legitur "The book is read".
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:
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 attributive participle is often, though not always, [5] used with the article (which can be either generic [6] or particular [7] [8]); it functions as a common adjective, it can be in every tense stem, and it is on a par with – and thus often translated as – a relative clause. [9]
The perfect and the passive participles of strong verbs in Germanic languages are irregular (e.g. driven) and must be learned for each verb. The perfect and passive participles of weak verbs, in contrast, are regular and are formed with the suffix -ed (e.g. fixed, supported, opened).