| • Science | • People | • Locations | • Timeline |
When the subject is the agent or actor of the verb, the verb is said to be in the active voice. When the subject is patient, target or undergoer of the action, it is said to be in the passive voice. For example, "The cat ate the mouse" is active, but "The mouse was eaten by the cat" is passive.
In a passive voice sentence, the subject and the direct object switch places. The direct object is promoted to subject, and the subject is demoted to a complement (that may be left out).
In English, the passive voice is a periphrastic construction, i .e. it's modelled using an ad hoc phrase structure with a different word order, an auxiliary verb and a participle of the main verb. In other languages, such as Latin, the passive voice is simply marked on the verb as an inflection.
Some languages (e. g. Sanskrit and Classical Greek) have a "middle voice". An intransitive verb that appears active but expresses a passive action characterizes the English middle voice. For example, in "The casserole cooked in the oven", "cooked" is syntactically active but semantically passive, putting it in the middle voice.
Many deponent verbs in Latin are also survivals of the Indo-European middle voice; many of these in turn survive as obligatory pseudo- reflexive verbs in the Romance languages such as French and Spanish.
Some languages have even more grammatical voices. For example, in Classic MongolianThe Mongolic languages are group of languages spoken in Central Asia. Some linguists propose the grouping of Mongolian languages with Turkic (of which Turkish is a member) and Tungusic as Altaic languages, but this is not universally agreed upon. The best there are five voices: active, passive, causative, reciprocal and cooperative.
Ergative languages usually don't have a passive voice, since their syntactic structure doesn't agree with it; instead some have an antipassive voiceThe antipassive voice is a verb voice found mostly in ergative languages. Like the passive voice, the antipassive decreases the verb's valency by one. The antipassive works on transitive verbs by deleting the object (marked with the absolutive case) and c that deletes the object of transitive verbs. Topic-prominent languageA topic-prominent language is one that organizes its syntax so that sentences have a topic-comment (or theme-rheme) structure, where the topic is the thing being talked about (predicated) and the comment is what is said about the topic. This structure iss like MandarinThis article is on all of the Northern Chinese dialects. For the standardized spoken Chinese language, see Standard Mandarin. Mandarin or Beifanghua (literally "Northern speech"), is a category of Chinese dialects spoken across most of northern and southw and JapaneseThe Japanese language is a spoken and written language used mainly in Japan. The Japanese name for the language is Nihongo . History and classification Historical linguists do not all agree about the origin of the Japanese language; there are several comp tend not to have a passive voice, or to use it only in very special cases.