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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 ...
The active voice is the most commonly used in many languages and represents the "normal" case, in which the subject of the verb is the agent. In the active voice, the subject of the sentence performs the action or causes the happening denoted by the verb. Sentence (1) is in active voice, as indicated by the verb form saw.
The active voice is the dominant voice used in English. Many commentators, notably George Orwell in his essay "Politics and the English Language" and Strunk & White in The Elements of Style, have urged minimizing use of the passive voice, but this is almost always based on these commentators' misunderstanding of what the passive voice is. [8]
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 ...
They are traditionally (and misleadingly) called "active" and "passive" voice because the speaker can choose to use either one rather like active and passive voice in English. However, because they are not true voice , terms such as "agent trigger" or "actor focus" are increasingly used for the accusative type (S=A) and "patient trigger" or ...
Swedish has a few passive-voice deponents, although its closely related neighbour languages Danish and Norwegian mostly use active corresponding forms. Indeed, Norwegian shows the opposite trend: like in English, active verbs are sometimes used with a passive or middle sense, such as in boka solgte 1000 eksemplarer ' the book sold 1000 copies '.
Also, they can appear essentially as an adjective modifying a noun. The form of a given perfect or passive participle is strongly influenced by the status of the verb at hand. 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 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 .