Active and passive voice

Intuition [Beginner]

Voice is about who or what gets to be the subject of the sentence. It tells you whether the subject does the action or receives the action.

• Active voice: The subject performs the action. "The dog chased the cat."
• Passive voice: The subject receives the action. "The cat was chased by the dog."

Notice how the same event can be described from either angle. The meaning is nearly the same, but the focus shifts. In the active sentence, the dog is the star. In the passive sentence, the cat is.

You form the passive with a form of be + past participle:

Active	Passive
writes	is written
wrote	was written
is writing	is being written
has written	has been written
will write	will be written

You can also include the original doer of the action using by + agent ("by the dog"), or you can leave it out entirely when the agent is unknown, obvious, or unimportant.

Visual [Beginner]

Active:   [Subject/Agent] ---acts on---> [Object/Patient]
          The dog          chased         the cat.

Passive:  [Subject/Patient] <---acted on by--- [Agent]
          The cat           was chased       by the dog.

Passive (agent omitted):
          The cat was chased.   (by whom? not stated, or not important)

How to convert active to passive:

1. Move the object to the subject position.
2. Change the verb to: be (matching the original tense) + past participle.
3. Optionally add "by + original subject" at the end.

Active:  The mechanic   fixed       the car.
         ----------     -----       --------
         subject        verb        object

Passive: The car        was fixed   by the mechanic.
         ----------     ---------   ---------------
         new subject    be + PP     agent phrase

Worked example [Beginner]

Convert each active sentence to passive.

1. "The committee approved the budget."

• Object ("the budget") becomes subject.
• Verb "approved" (past simple) becomes "was approved" (was + past participle).
• Agent: "by the committee."
• Result: "The budget was approved by the committee."

2. "Someone stole my bicycle."

• Object ("my bicycle") becomes subject.
• Verb "stole" becomes "was stolen."
• Agent: we can omit "someone" because it is vague.
• Result: "My bicycle was stolen."

3. "The company is launching a new product."

• Object ("a new product") becomes subject.
• Verb "is launching" (present progressive) becomes "is being launched."
• Result: "A new product is being launched by the company."

Check your understanding [Beginner]

Formal definition [Intermediate+]

Voice is a grammatical category that indicates the relationship between the participants in an event (agent, patient, theme) and the grammatical roles (subject, object) assigned to them.

In English, voice is marked on the verb phrase:

• Active voice: The subject of the clause corresponds to the semantic agent. The verb appears in its standard form. Example: The wind destroyed the roof.
• Passive voice: The subject of the clause corresponds to the semantic patient or theme. The verb phrase takes the form be (inflected for tense and agreement) + past participle. The agent, if expressed, appears in an oblique by-phrase. Example: The roof was destroyed by the wind.

The passive applies to monotransitive, ditransitive, and complex transitive clauses:

Clause type	Active	Passive
Monotransitive	She sent the letter.	The letter was sent (by her).
Ditransitive	She gave him the book.	He was given the book. / The book was given to him.
Complex transitive	They consider her a genius.	She is considered a genius.

With ditransitive verbs, either object can become the passive subject, producing two possible passive constructions (the indirect object passive and the direct object passive).

Agent omission is the norm rather than the exception in English passives. Corpus studies show that roughly 80% of English passive clauses lack an expressed agent.

Key concepts [Intermediate+]

1. Agent promotion and patient demotion. The passive takes the patient (direct object of the active clause) and promotes it to subject position. The agent is demoted to an oblique by-phrase or omitted entirely. This changes what the sentence is "about" -- its topic.

2. The get-passive. English has a second passive construction using get instead of be: "The window got broken." The get-passive typically emphasizes the event rather than the resulting state and often carries connotations of adversity or benefit to the subject. It is more common in informal registers.

3. Adjectival passive vs. verbal passive. "The door was closed" is ambiguous: it can be a verbal passive (an event: someone closed the door) or an adjectival passive (a state: the door was in a closed condition). Tests for distinguishing them include modification by adverbs (The door was tightly closed favors adjectival) and the ability to add a by-phrase (The door was closed by the janitor forces a verbal reading).

4. Middle voice and anti-passive. English has constructions that resemble the passive but are not true passives: "This book sells well" (middle), "The car steers easily." These have active morphology but passive-like semantics -- the subject is the patient, but no agent is implied. Cross-linguistically, some languages mark a distinct middle voice for such constructions.

5. When to prefer active voice. In most writing contexts, active voice is preferred because it is direct, concise, and makes agency clear. Passive voice is appropriate when the agent is unknown, irrelevant, or deliberately backgrounded, or when the patient is the topic of the discourse.

Linguistic theory [Master]

The analysis of passive has been central to generative syntax since Chomsky (1957). In Government and Binding theory (Chomsky 1981), passive is treated as a movement operation: the object NP moves from its base position (object of V) to the subject position (Spec, IP), leaving behind a trace. The passive morpheme (-en) absorbs the verb's external theta-role (the agent) and its accusative Case-assigning ability, which is what forces the object to move -- it can no longer receive Case in situ.

In Minimalism (Chomsky 1995, 2000), the passive is analyzed as involving smuggling (Collins 2005): the passive participle's Voice head lacks the probe that would assign the external theta-role, and the object moves to Spec, T to satisfy the EPP feature of T. The by-phrase is analyzed as an adjunct introducing the suppressed external argument, sometimes treated as a PP headed by by with a nominal complement that receives the agent theta-role.

Baker, Johnson, and Roberts (1989) argue that the passive morpheme (-en) is itself a clausal subject argument that absorbs the external theta-role. Under this analysis, passive sentences are essentially ergative: the passive morpheme functions like a pronominal agent.

Cross-linguistically, passive constructions vary significantly. Some languages (Lithuanian, Latin) have both personal and impersonal passives. Impersonal passives can promote intransitive subjects: "It was slept." Others (German, Dutch) allow prepositional passives more freely than English. Languages with ergative-absolutive alignment (Basque, Inuktitut) have passive-like constructions that behave differently because the alignment of grammatical relations differs from nominative-accusative languages like English.

The functional-typological literature (Siewierska 1984; Keenan & Dryer 2007) classifies passives along dimensions of agent prominence (is the agent expressed?), subject properties (does the promoted NP acquire full subject properties?), and verb generality (which verbs can passivize?).

Historical context [Master]

The English passive construction descends from the Old English passive, which used wesan/beon + past participle for action passives and weorthan + past participle for eventive passives. Weorthan ("to become") fell out of use as a passive auxiliary during the Middle English period, leaving be as the sole passive auxiliary.

The get-passive emerged in colloquial English around the 18th century and expanded in the 19th-20th centuries. It is still considered informal and is absent from most prescriptive writing guides, though it is fully grammatical in spoken English.

The prescriptive bias against passive voice in English writing is largely a 20th-century phenomenon. Fowler (1926) and Strunk & White (1959) both cautioned against overuse, and the advice became a staple of American composition pedagogy. However, corpus studies show that academic and scientific writing uses passive voice heavily (often 25-30% of finite clauses), particularly in methodology sections where the focus is on procedures rather than agents.

Bibliography [Master]

• Baker, M., Johnson, K., & Roberts, I. (1989). Passive arguments raised. Linguistic Inquiry, 20(2), 219-251.
• Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic Structures. Mouton.
• Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on Government and Binding. Foris.
• Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program. MIT Press.
• Collins, C. (2005). A smuggling approach to the passive in English. Syntax, 8(2), 81-120.
• Keenan, E., & Dryer, M. (2007). Passive in the world's languages. In T. Shopen (Ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Vol. 1. Cambridge University Press.
• Siewierska, A. (1984). The Passive: A Comparative Linguistic Analysis. Croom Helm.