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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.
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]
In these languages, a verb is typically in the active voice when the subject of the verb is the doer of the action. In active voice, the subject of the sentence performs the action expressed by the main verb and is thus the agent. For example, in the sentence "The cat ate the fish", 'the cat' is the agent performing the action of eating. [1]
A double passive formed from that sentence would be: The project was attempted to be completed. with both verbs changed simultaneously to the passive voice, even though the first verb takes no object – it is not possible to say *We attempted the project to be completed, which is the sentence from which the double passive would appear to derive.
Mignon Fogarty also points out that "passive sentences aren't incorrect" [24] and "If you don't know who is responsible for an action, passive voice can be the best choice". [ 25 ] [d] When the active or passive voice can be used without much awkwardness, there are differing opinions about which is preferable.
—Passive sentence identifies a book as an object in the starting sentence. b. I was given a book.—Passive sentence identifies me as an object in the starting sentence. The second criterion is also a reliable criterion for analytic languages such as English, since the relatively strict word order of English usually positions the object after ...
The object of the active sentence is changed to the subject of the corresponding passive sentence: [16] (a) Drunks could put off the customers. (b) The customers could be put off by drunks. The fact that sentence (b), the passive sentence, is acceptable, suggests that Drunks and the customers are constituents in sentence (a). The passivization ...
For example, in many variants of transformational grammar, the English active voice sentence "Emma saw Daisy" and its passive counterpart "Daisy was seen by Emma" share a common deep structure generated by phrase structure rules, differing only in that the latter's structure is modified by a passivization transformation rule.