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I. the Passive in English

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I. the Passive in English I. The Passive in English 1.1 Introduction: Voice The passive is a part of a wider concept - the concept of 'voice*. Therefore, one may firstly try to find out what the term 'voice' means. 1.1.1 The Origin of the Term 'Passive' The passive is a part of the voice system in English, which has attracted attention of grammarians and linguists for long. Mustanoja (1960) states that the primitive Indo-European had two voices, active and middle. The passive is a later development. The middle disappeared as the passive gained ground. According to Mustanoja (1960), the ultimate origin of the passive voice is obscure. Bloomfield (1963) goes back to Latin and points out that there are two types of construction - one with an actor-action construction: amat 'he (she, it) loves', and one with a goal-action construction: amatur 'he (she, it) is loved'. Similarly, Hockett (1958) states that two of the inflectional categories that Latin verbs have are 'voice' and 'aspect'. There are two voices, 'active' and 'passive', and there are two aspects, 'imperfective' and 'perfective'. According to Myers (1966), Latin has one set of active inflections called the 'active voice', and an incomplete set of inflections, such as 'vocor', pieced out with verb phrases such as 'vocatus sum', called the 'passive voice'. Myers (1966) rightly points out that English does not have two comparable sets of inflections, but the term 'voice' is still used. In the study of the grammar of English, these terms were initially borrowed fi-om the study of Latin. 1.1.2 Definitions of Voice Gorrell and Laird (1953) define voice as a distinction in verb forms between the active, in which the subject of the verb is the actor, and the passive, in which the subject of the verb receives the action. Without using terms like 'agent' and 'recipient', Myers (1966) simply states that constructions like 'I call' are said to be 'active', and constructions such as 'I am called' are said to be 'passive'. Marckwardt (1964) states that in contrast to Latin, all the forms of the English passive are periphrastic in form. Todd and Hancock (1986) state that in traditional grammars, English verbs are classified according to tense, voice and mood, largely because such distinctions are relevant to Latin verbs. They define 'active voice' as the term used to categorise sentences, clauses and verb phrases where the subject of the sentence is the agent or instigator of the action. Quirk et al. (1972) and Quirk et al. (1985) define voice as a grammatical category that makes it possible to view the action of a sentence in two ways, without any change in the facts that are reported in the sentence. 1.1.3 The Active-Passive Alternation Very often voice is not defined independently, but defined only through definitions of the active and the passive voices, or simply illustrated by giving examples of both the constructions. Huddleston (1984) illustrates the system of voice with one example each of the two voices, and states fiirther that the unmarked member of the pair is said to be in the active voice, and the marked one in the passive voice. The terms 'active voice' and 'passive voice' are based on the role of the 'subject- referent' in clauses that express an action. Thus, for Huddleston (1984), voice is a general linguistic term that is applied to systems yielding such variation in the semantic roles associated with the subject of the sentence, with a concomitant variation in the form of the VP. He applies the term both to the clause system and to the VP system. Kroeger (2004) states that the opposition or alternation between active and passive is the most common type of voice system among the languages of the world. According to Shibatani (1988), voice is "a mechanism that selects a grammatically prominent syntactic constituent - subject - fi-om the underlying semantic function ('case' or 'thematic roles') of a clause" (p. 3). Shibatani (1988) fiirther states that in the prototypical passive form, a patient fimctions as a subject. The classical languages like Greek and Sanskrit also have the middle voice, similar to the passive voice, which is a later development in Indo-European languages. According to Mustanoja (1960), while an active clause describes an action fi-om the beginning to the end, i.e., from the initiating force (subject) to the goal (object), in a passive clause the action is traced back fi"om the end to the beginning. According to Arce-Arenales et al. (1994), the difference between the passive and 'middle diathesis' is that in the latter, the 'agent-subject-topic' also exhibits the status of an affected entity. (See Arce-Arenales et al., 1994 for more details about the distinction between the active, 'middle diathesis' and the passive.) 1.2 The Passive in Relation to the Active in English The passive voice is often defined and described in relation to or in contrast with the active voice. This section is about the relationship between the active and the passive in English. 1.2.1 Various Views on the Active and the Passive Broadly, there seem to be two kinds of approach to the active voice. One is that the active voice is any clause or sentence in which the agent of the action is the subject. Only some of such sentences can be turned into the passive. Berk (1999) is of the view that active sentences are unmarked, and if a sentence is not specifically marked passive, it is technically active. Leech et al. (1982) also take the view that where there is no passive voice auxiliary, the verb phrase is in the active voice. But a majority of the grammarians seem to define the active voice only in relation to the passive. Asher (1994) refers to the active voice in terms of the active- passive alternation in English, For Biber et al. (1999), it is only transitive verbs that are in the active voice, which is usually the case for active verbs. Further, they mention that transitive verbs can also occur in the passive voice. Quirk et al. (1972) describe the two types of voice as two ways of viewing the action of the sentence, without change in the meaning. Quirk et al, (1985), too, hold the same view. Jacobs and Rosenbaum (1968), Ouhalla (1994), Leech and Svartvik (1975) and Morenberg (1997) also write about the passive in relation to the active, with the view that they are svnonvmous. Halliday (1985) has a different view to offer regarding the active voice. For him, a sentence that is not in the passive is not necessarily in the active. A clause with no feature of 'agency' is neither active nor passive, but 'middle'. One with agency is non-middle or 'effective' in voice. An effective clause is then either active or passive. 1.2.2 Semantic Roles of Participants in the Active and the Passive Most grammarians also agree that the active and corresponding passive constructions have usually the same meaning. Kroeger (2004) maintains that the two forms have the same basic meaning and the same participants filling the same semantic roles. Cattell (1969) states that every native speaker of English feels that there is some relationship between active and passive sentences. Even if Jespersen (1933) is of the view that one and the same idea can often be expressed in the two different ways, he also adds that they are not synonymous in every respect, which shows that it is "not superfluous for a language to have both turns and thus be able to shift the point of view. As a rule the person or thing that is the centre of interest at the moment is made the subject of the sentence, and therefore the verb is in some cases put in the active, and in others in the passive" (p. 120). In Radford (1997) and Radford (2004) also we find similar views on identical thematic (i.e. semantic) roles in the two voices. Mihailovic (1967) is of the view that active and passive clauses which do not fulfil this condition do not stand in a transformational relationship. Downing and Locke (2002) distinguish between the two types of voice on the basis of the terms the 'Agent' and the 'Affected'. Leech et al. (1982) mention the view traditionally held that the 'grammatical' subject of the passive is the 'logical' object of the active clause. Schibsbye (1970) also uses the terms 'logical subject' and the 'logical object'. Bloor and Bloor (1995) use the terms the 'performer of the action', the 'beneficiary' and the 'goal of the action'. Gorrell and Laird (1953) point out that usually (i.e. in an active construction) the agent or the actor is mentioned first in a sentence. When the agent or actor is less important than the action or the result, or the actor is unknown or should not be mentioned, or continuity requires that some word other than the actor appear first, the passive construction is used. But there are some grammarians who have rejected such a notional definition of the active and the passive. (For example, Huddleston, 1984.) Huddleston (1976) does admit that the subject of the active voice has the role of the 'actor' or the active participant and that of the passive voice has the role of the patient or the passive participant. But he asserts that this difference in the semantic role of the 'surface subject' does not serve to define active and passive sentences. He points out that sentences such as "Everyone knows the answer" and "The answer was known by everyone" do not express the action of an actor on a patient.
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