Voice (grammar)

In grammar, the voice of a verb describes the relationship between the action (or state) that the verb
expresses and the participants identified by its arguments (subject, object, etc.). When the subject is the
agent or doer of the action, the verb is in the active voice. When the subject is the patient, target or
undergoer of the action, the verb is said to be in the passive voice. Voice is sometimes called diathesis.[1]

For example, in the sentence:

The cat ate the mouse.

the verb "ate" is in the active voice. However, in the sentence:

The mouse was eaten by the cat.

the verbal phrase "was eaten" is passive.

In the sentence:

The hunter killed the bear.

the verb "killed" is in the active voice, and the doer of the action is the "hunter". A passive version of the
sentence is:

The bear was killed by the hunter.

where the verbal phrase "was killed" is followed by the word "by" and then by the doer "hunter".

In a transformation from an active-voice clause to an equivalent passive-voice construction, the subject

and the direct object switch grammatical roles. The direct object gets promoted to subject, and the subject
demoted to an (optional) adjunct. In the first example above, the mouse serves as the direct object in the
active-voice version, but becomes the subject in the passive version. The subject of the active-voice
version, the cat, becomes part of a prepositional phrase in the passive version of the sentence, and can be
left out entirely.

Contents
History
Active
Passive
Middle
Others
Passive in topic-prominent languages
Chinese
Mandarin
Cantonese
 Japanese
Impersonal constructions
Fourth person in Finnic languages
Other impersonal forms
Impersonal in Celtic languages
Dynamic and static passive
German
English
Swedish
Spanish
Italian
Venetian
List of voices
See also
Notes
References

History
In the grammar of Ancient Greek, voice was called διάθεσις (diáthesis) "arrangement" or "condition",
with three subcategories: active (ἐνέργεια [enérgeia]), passive (πάθος [páthos]), and middle (μεσότης
[mesótēs]).[2][3] In Latin there are two voices: active and passive (Latin: [genus] activum, passivum).

Active
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.

Example: Kabaisa ate the potatoes.

The verb ate indicates the active voice. But consider the following sentence which is in passive voice:

The potatoes were eaten by Kabaisa.

The words were eaten indicate the passive voice.

The passive voice shows that something has been acted upon by someone or something else.

Passive

The passive voice is employed in a clause whose subject expresses the theme or patient of the verb. That
is, it undergoes an action or has its state changed.[4]
In the passive voice the grammatical subject of the verb is the recipient (not the doer) of the action
denoted by the verb.

Some languages, such as English and Spanish, use a periphrastic passive voice; that is, it is not a single
word form, but rather a construction making use of other word forms. Specifically, it is made up of a
form of the auxiliary verb to be and a past participle of the main verb. In other languages, such as Latin,
the passive voice is simply marked on the verb by inflection: librum legit "He reads the book"; liber
legitur "The book is read".

Middle

Some languages (such as Albanian, Bengali, Fula, Tamil, Sanskrit, Icelandic, Swedish, Biblical Hebrew,
Modern Hebrew and Ancient Greek) have a middle voice, which is a set of inflections or constructions
which is to some extent different from both the active and passive voices. The middle voice is said to be
in the middle between the active and the passive voices because the subject often cannot be categorized
as either agent or patient but may have elements of both. For example, it may express what would be an
intransitive verb in English. In The casserole cooked in the oven, cooked is syntactically active but
semantically passive. In Classical Greek, the middle voice often has a reflexive sense: the subject acts on
or for itself, such as "The boy washes himself", or "The boy washes". It can be transitive or intransitive.
It can occasionally be used in a causative sense, such as "The father causes his son to be set free", or
"The father ransoms his son".

In English there is no verb form for the middle voice, though some uses may be classified by traditional
grammarians as middle voice, often resolved via a reflexive pronoun, as in "Fred shaved", which may be
expanded to "Fred shaved himself" – contrast with active "Fred shaved John" or passive "John was
shaved by Fred". This need not be reflexive, as in "my clothes soaked in detergent overnight". English
used to have a distinct form, called the passival, which was displaced over the early 19th century by the
progressive passive and is no longer used in English.[5][6] In the passival, one might say "The house is
building.", which may today be rendered instead as "The house is being built." Likewise "The meal is
eating.", which is now "The meal is being eaten." Note that the similar "Fred is shaving" and "The meal
is cooking" remain grammatical. It is suggested that the progressive passive was popularized by the
Romantic poets, and is connected with Bristol usage.[5][7]

Many deponent verbs in Latin (i.e., verbs passive in form but active in meaning) are survivals of the
Proto-Indo-European middle voice.[8]

Others
Some languages have even more grammatical voices. For example, Classical Mongolian features five
voices: active, passive, causative, reciprocal, and cooperative. Hebrew has active, passive, causative,
causative-passive, intensive, intensive-passive and reflexive voices.

The antipassive voice deletes or demotes the object of transitive verbs, and promotes the actor to an
intransitive subject. This voice is very common among ergative–absolutive languages (which may feature
passive voices as well), but also occurs among nominative–accusative languages.
There are also constructions in some languages that appear to change the valence of a verb, but in fact do
not. So called hierarchical or inversion languages are of this sort. Their agreement system will be
sensitive to an external person or animacy hierarchy (or a combination of both): 1 > 2 > 3 or Anim > Inan
and so forth. E.g., in Meskwaki (an Algonquian language), verbs inflect for both subject and object, but
agreement markers do not have inherent values for these. Rather, a third marker, the direct or inverse
marker, indicates the proper interpretation: ne-wa:pam-e:-w-a [1-look.at-DIR-3-3Sg] "I am looking at
him", but ne-wa:pam-ekw-w-a [1-look.at-INV-3-3Sg] "He is looking at me". Some scholars (notably
Rhodes) have analyzed this as a kind of obligatory passivization dependent on animacy, while others
have claimed it is not a voice at all, but rather see inversion as another type of alignment, parallel to
nominative–accusative, ergative–absolutive, split-S, and fluid-S alignments.

Passive in topic-prominent languages

Chinese

Mandarin
Topic-prominent languages like Mandarin tend not to employ the passive voice as frequently. In general,
Mandarin is best analyzed as using middle voice, but Mandarin-speakers can construct a passive voice by
using the coverb 被 (bèi) and rearranging the usual word order.[9] For example, this sentence using active
voice:

Note: the first line is in Traditional Chinese while the second is Simplified Chinese.

一條 狗 咬了
一条 狗 咬了
Yī-tiáo gǒu yǎo-le
Α dog bite-PERFECT
這個 男人。
这个 男人。
zhège nánrén.
this man
"A dog has bitten this man."

corresponds to the following sentence using passive voice. Note that the agent phrase is optional.

這個 男人 被
这个 男人 被
Zhège nánrén bèi
This man PASSIVE

( 狗) 咬了。
( 狗) 咬了。
(gǒu) yǎo-le.
(dog) bite-PERFECT
"This man has been bitten (by a dog)."
In addition, through the addition of the auxiliary verb "to be" 是 (shì) the passive voice is frequently used
to emphasize the identity of the actor. This example places emphasis on the dog, presumably as opposed
to some other animal:

這個 男人 是
这个 男人 是
Zhège nánrén shì
This man to be
被 狗 咬
被 狗 咬
bèi gǒu yǎo
PASSIVE dog bite
的。
的。
de.
(suffix)
"This man has been bitten by a dog."

Mandarin has also an object-retaining passive which contains both object and topic (mostly the possessor
of the object):

他 被 小偷
他 被 小偷
tā bèi xiǎotou
He PASSIVE thief
偷了 錢包。
偷了 钱包。
tōu-le qiánbāo
steal-PERFECT wallet
"His wallet was stolen by a thief."

被 (bèi) as a passive marker is a relatively new addition to the language, introduced as part of the early
20th century language reforms that also added gender-specific pronouns such as 他>她 and 你>妳 and
culminated in attempts to romanize Chinese entirely. Classically, 被 marked an adversative mood,
indicating that something bad had happened. Even today, the following sentence is perfectly acceptable
in speech：

蛋糕 吃了。
蛋糕 吃了。
dangao chi-le
cake eat-PERFECT
"The cake was eaten."

In general, Chinese employs middle voice.[10] For a fuller treatment of Chinese morphosyntax see He,
Xiaoling, Patient-Subject Constructions In Mandarin Chinese: Syntax, Semantics, Discourse. See also the
discussion in works such as Li, Charles N; Thompson, Sandra A, where, arguing against Chao's analysis
of Mandarin, the two dispute that there is a distinct class of middle voice verbs, but in so doing recognize
that Mandarin (and Cantonese) verbs as a whole behave the same way.

Cantonese
In Cantonese, those features are quite similar by using the coverb 俾 (bei2), but the agent phrase is NOT
optional, often with a formal agent 人 (jan4):

個 男人 俾
Go3 naam4jan4 bei2
The man PASSIVE

狗 咬唨喇。
gau2 ngaau5-zo2-laa3
dog bite-PERFECTIVE-PERFECT
"The man has been bitten by a dog."

佢 俾 人
Keoi5 bei2 jan4
He/She/It PASSIVE someone
食唨喇。
sik6-zo2-laa3
eat-PERFECTIVE-PERFECT
"He/She/It has been eaten (by someone)."

However, in some dialects of Yue, a passive voice with an optional agent phrase is also available:

Qinzhou (Qin-Lian Yue):

佢 著 打喇。
Ki3 zoek6 daa2-laa3
He/She/It PASSIVE beat-PERFECT
"He/She/It has been beaten."

In the actor-emphasizing passive voice of Cantonese, besides the addition of the auxiliary verb "to be" 係
(hai6), the perfective event is also converted to an adjective-like predicative with the suffix 嘅 (ge3) or 㗎
(gaa3), which is a more emphasized one from the liaison of 嘅 (ge3) and 啊 (aa3):

個 男人 係
Go3 naam4jan4 hai6
The man to be
俾 狗 咬
bei2 gau2 ngaau5
PASSIVE dog bite
嘅。
ge3
(suffix)
"The man was bitten by a dog."
Japanese
Although a topic-prominent language, Japanese employs the passive voice quite frequently, and has two
types of passive voice, one that corresponds to that in English and an indirect passive not found in
English. This indirect passive is used when something undesirable happens to the speaker.

彼 は 泥棒
Kare wa dorobō
He TOPIC thief
に 財布 を
ni saifu o
AGENT wallet OBJECT

盗まれた。
nusumareta.
steal-PASSIVE-PAST
"He got his wallet stolen."

僕 は 彼女
Boku wa kanojo
I TOPIC her
に 嘘 を
ni uso o
AGENT lie OBJECT

つかれた。
tsukareta.
tell-PASSIVE-PAST
"I was lied to by her." (= "She lied to me.")

Impersonal constructions

Fourth person in Finnic languages

Some languages do not contrast voices, but have other similar constructions. For example, Finnic
languages such as Finnish and Estonian have a "passive", expressed by conjugating the verb in "common
person". Although it is generally referred to as the passive ("passiivi") in Finnish grammars, it may more
appropriately be referred to as the fourth person form of a verb.

The function of the fourth person is simply to leave out the agent. The agent is almost always human and
never mentioned.

Action is performed actively, so in Finnish the agent must be capable of own initiative; e.g., "a dog bit
me" -> "I was bitten", but "wind blew over a car" can't be converted into "a car was blown over". The
latter would imply somebody or something either blowing over the car or otherwise causing the wind.

The grammatical role of the object remains unaltered, and thus transitivity may also be used. For
example, the fourth-person construction Ikkuna hajotettiin, with a transitive verb, means "Someone broke
the window", while the third-person construction Ikkuna hajosi uses the anticausative and means "The
window broke".

Other impersonal forms

Similarly in French, Spanish and Welsh, impersonal forms are used: On lit le journal.; Se lee el
periódico.; Darllenir y papur newydd.: "One reads the newspaper.", i.e., "The newspaper is read."

Impersonal in Celtic languages

Celtic languages have an inflection commonly called the "impersonal" or "autonomous" form,[11] of
similar origin to the Latin "passive-impersonal". This is similar to a passive construction in that the agent
of the verb is not specified. However its syntax is different from prototypical passives, in that the object
of the action remains in the accusative.[12]

It is similar to the use of the pronoun "on" in French (except wherever "on" is instead used an alternative
to "we", which is very frequent). It increasingly corresponds to the passive in modern English, in which
there is a trend towards avoiding the use of the passive unless it is specifically required to omit the
subject. It also appears to be similar to the "fourth person" mentioned in the preceding paragraph.
However, what is called in Irish an briathar saor or the free verb does not suggest passivity but a kind of
generalised agency.

The construction has equal validity in transitive and intransitive clauses, and the best translation into
English is normally by using the "dummy" subjects "they", "one", or impersonal "you". For example, the
common sign against tobacco consumption has its closest direct translation in English as "No smoking":

Ná caitear tabac
Don't use-IMPERSONAL tobacco.

An example of its use as an intransitive is:

Téithear go dtí an sráidbhaile

Go-IMPERSONAL to the village
go minic Dé Sathairn
often Saturday
"People often go to the village of a Saturday."

The difference between the autonomous and a true passive is that while the autonomous focuses on the
action and overtly avoids mentioning the actor, there is nonetheless an anonymous agent who may be
referred to in the sentence. For instance:[13]

Théití ag ithe
go[PAST.HAB.AUT] eat PROG

béile le chéile
meal with each other
"People used to go eating a meal together."
In English, the formation of the passive allows the optional inclusion of an agent in a prepositional
phrase, "by the man", etc. Where English would leave out the noun phrase, Irish uses the autonomous;
where English includes the noun phrase, Irish uses its periphrastic passive – which can also leave out the
noun phrase:

The tobacco was

Bhí an tabac
Was the tobacco
smoked (by the
caite (ag an
consumed (by the
man)
bhfear)
man)

The impersonal endings have been re-analysed as a passive voice in Modern Welsh and the agent can be
included after the preposition gan (by):

Cenir y gân gan y côr.

The song is sung by the choir.

Dynamic and static passive

Some linguists draw a distinction between static (or stative) passive voice and dynamic (or eventive)
passive voice in some languages. Examples include English, German, Swedish, Spanish and Italian.
"Static" means that an action was done to the subject at a certain point in time resulting in a state in the
time focussed upon, whereas "dynamic" means that an action takes place.

German

Static passive auxiliary verb: sein

Dynamic passive auxiliary verb: werden

Der Rasen ist gemäht ("The lawn is mown", static)

Der Rasen wird gemäht ("The lawn is being mown", literally "The lawn becomes mown",
dynamic)

English

Static passive auxiliary verb: be (the "be-passive")

Dynamic passive auxiliary verb: get (the "get-passive")
Note that for some speakers of English this is not accepted and is considered colloquial or sub-standard.

The grass is cut (static)

The grass gets cut or The grass is being cut (dynamic)
Swedish

Static passive auxiliary verb: vara (är, var, varit)

Dynamic passive auxiliary verb: bli (blir, blev, blivit)
Dynamic passive in Swedish is also frequently expressed with the s-ending.

Dörren är öppnad. "The door has been opened."

Dörren blir öppnad. "The door is being opened."

The vara passive is often synonymous with, and sometimes preferable to, simply using the
corresponding adjective:

Dörren är öppen. "The door is open."

The bli passive is often synonymous with, and sometimes preferable to, the s-passive:

Dörren öppnas. "The door is opening."

Spanish
Spanish has two verbs corresponding to English to be: ser and estar. Ser is used to form the ordinary
(dynamic) passive voice:

La puerta es abierta. "The door is [being] opened [by someone]"

La puerta es cerrada. "The door is [being] closed [by someone]"

However, this construction is very unidiomatic. The usual passive voice is the se pasiva, in which the
verb is conjugated in the active voice, but preceded by the se particle:

La puerta se abre.
La puerta se cierra.

Estar is used to form what might be termed a static passive voice (not regarded as a passive voice in
traditional Spanish grammar):

La puerta está abierta. "The door is open.", i.e., it has been opened.
La puerta está cerrada. "The door is closed.", i.e., it has been closed.

In the ser and estar cases, the verb's participle is used as the complement (as is sometimes the case in
English).

Italian
Italian uses two verbs (essere and venire) to translate the static and the dynamic passive:

Dynamic passive auxiliary verb: essere and venire (to be and to come)

La porta è aperta. or La porta viene aperta. "The door is opened [by someone]" or "The
door comes open [by someone]".
La porta è chiusa. or La porta viene chiusa. "The door is closed [by someone]" or "The
door comes closed [by someone]".
Static passive auxiliary verb: essere (to be)

La porta è aperta. "The door is open," i.e., it has been opened.

La porta è chiusa. "The door is closed," i.e., it has been closed.

Venetian
In Venetian (Vèneto) the difference between dynamic (true) passive and stative (adjectival) passive is
more clear cut, using èser (to be) only for the static passives and vegner (to become, to come) only for
the dynamic passive:

Ła porta ła vien verta. "The door is opened", dynamic

Ła porta ła xè / l'è verta. "The door is open", static

Static forms represents much more a property or general condition, whereas the dynamic form is a real
passive action entailing "by someone":

èser proteto. "To be protected = to be in a safe condition", static

vegner proteto. "To be protected = to be defended (by so)", dynamic

èser considarà. "To be considered = to have a (good) reputation", static

vegner considarà. "To be taken into consideration (by people, by so)", dynamic

èser raprexentà (a l'ONU). "To be represented (at the UN) = to have a representation",
static
vegner raprexentà a l'ONU (da un dełegà). "To be represented at the UN (by a
delegate)", dynamic

List of voices
Voices found in various languages include:

Active voice
Adjutative voice
Antipassive voice
Applicative voice
Causative voice
Circumstantial voice
Impersonal passive voice
Mediopassive voice
Medium voice = middle voice
Neuter voice
Passive voice
Reciprocal voice (subject and object perform the verbal action to each other, e.g., She and I
cut each other's hair)
Reflexive voice (the subject and the object of the verb are the same, as in I see myself (in
the mirror))

See also
Anticausative verb
 Dative shift
Deponent verb
Description
Diathesis alternation
English passive voice
E-Prime
Grammatical conjugation
Morphosyntactic alignment
Unaccusative verb
Valency (linguistics)

Notes
1. Allan, Rutger (2013). "Diathesis/Voice (Morphology of)". Encyclopedia of Ancient Greek
Language and Linguistics. doi:10.1163/2214-448X_eagll_COM_00000099 (https://doi.org/1
0.1163%2F2214-448X_eagll_COM_00000099).
2. Dionysius Thrax. τέχνη γραμματική (Art of Grammar). ιγ´ περὶ ῥήματος (http://www.hs-augs
burg.de/~harsch/graeca/Chronologia/S_ante02/DionysiosThrax/dio_tech.html) (13. On the
verb).
3. διάθεσις (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=di
a/qesis). Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; A Greek–English Lexicon at the Perseus
Project
4. O'Grady, William, John Archibald, Mark Aronoff, and Janie Rees-Miller (eds.) (2001).
Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction Fourth edition. Boston: Bedord/St. Martin's.
ISBN 0-312-24738-9
5. Mike Vuolo, "The House is Building"? Why you never learned the passival tense, even
though it used to be proper English grammar. (http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexico
n_valley/2012/05/lexicon_valley_when_the_progressive_passive_replaced_the_passival_in
_english_grammar_.html), Slate, May 29, 2012
6. Liberman, Mark (January 13, 2011). "A peeve for the ages" (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.ed
u/nll/?p=2903). Language Log. UPenn.
7. Platt and Denison (http://www.manchester.ac.uk/research/David.denison), "The language of
the Southey-Coleridge Circle (http://www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/subjects/lel/staff/david-deniso
n/papers/thefile,100129,en.pdf)", Language Sciences 2000
8. Sihler, Andrew L, "New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin (https://books.google.co.
uk/books?id=tcVTC9XJN-8C)", 1995, Oxford University Press
9. Li & Thompson (1981)
10. https://scholarship.tricolib.brynmawr.edu/bitstream/handle/10066/10847/Baglini_thesis_2007.p
sequence=3&isAllowed=y
11. Martin John Ball, James Fife (1992). The Celtic Languages. New York: Routledge. pp. 14–
15. ISBN 0-415-01035-7.
12. Na Bráithre Críostaí (1960). GRAIMÉAR GAEILGE na mBRÁITHRE CRÍOSTAÍ. M.H. Mac
an Ghoill agus a Mhac Teo.
13. McCloskey, Jim (January 2007). "the Grammar of Autonomy In Irish" (http://ohlone.ucsc.ed
u/~jim/PDF/auton.pdf) (PDF). Hypothesis A/Hypothesis B: Linguistic Explorations in Honor
of David M. Perlmutter.

References
 Li, Charles N.; Thompson, Sandra A. (1981). Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference
Grammar. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-06610-3.

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