PASSIVE VOICE

Definition of passive voice

In traditional grammar a type of sentence or clauses in which the subject receives the action of the verb.

Example:

            a good time was had by all

            Contrast with active voice. The most common form of the passive in English is the short passive or agentless passive. Agentless passive is a contruction in which the agent (that is, the performer of an action) is not identified. Example: “Mistakes were made” (in a long passive, the object of the verb in an active sentence becomes the subject). See the discussion of the passive gradient in examples and observations, below.

            The passiev voice is formed by using the appropriate form of the verb to be (for example: “is”) and a past participle (for example: “formed”). Also see the discussion of the “get”-passive in Examples and Observations, below.

Though style guides discourage use of the passive, the construction can be quite useful, especially when the performer of an action is unknown or unimportant.

See also:

Passivization

Voice

Bureaucratese

Double Passive

Emphasis

End-Focus

Ergative

Get-Passive

Passive Infinitive

Practice in Changing Verbs From Passive to Active: A Sentence-Revision Exercise

Pseudo-Passive

SVO (Subject-Verb-Object)

Ten Quick Questions and Answers About Verbs and Verbals

Transformation

Examples and Observations:

Last week our dogwood tree was struck by lightning.

"Pandora, from Greek mythology, was given a box with all the world's evils in it."

(Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture, 2008)

            It is believed that in the elementary school a class of fifteen pupils for one teacher gives better results than either a class of three or a class of thirty."

(Psychological Foundations of Educational Technology, ed. by W.C. Trow and E.E. Haddan, 1976)

"[Fern] found an old milking stool that had been discarded, and she placed the stool in the sheepfold next to Wilbur's pen."

(E.B. White, Charlotte's Web, 1952)

"America was discovered accidentally by a great seaman who was looking for something else . . .. America was named after a man who discovered no part of the New World. History is like that, very chancy."

(Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People, 1965)

"Her bones were found round thirty years later when they razed her building to put up a parking lot."

(Maya Angelou, "Chicken-Licken." Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well, 1975)

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry andhas been widely regarded as a bad move."

(Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 1979)

"Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale."

(attributed to Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

"The young gentleman was later seen by me in front of the gare Saint-Lazare."

(Raymond Queneau, "Passive." Exercises in Style , 1947)

In Defense of the Passive Voice

            "The proportion of passive verbs varies with the type of prose: scientific prose, for instance, may show far more passives than narrative prose. But to point this out is not to denigrate scientific writing. The difference merely reflects the different natures of content, purpose, and audience. 

"Not only is the passive voice a significantly frequent option in modern prose, but it is also often the clearest and briefest way to convey information

"Indiscriminate slandering of the passive voice ought to be stopped. The passive should be recognized as a quite decent and respectable structure of English grammar, neither better nor worse than other structures. When it is properly chosen, wordiness and obscurity are no more increased than when the active voice is properly chosen. Its effective and appropriate use can be taught."

(Jane R. Walpole, "Why Must the Passive Be Damned?" College Composition and Communication, 1979)

"In general, the passive voice should be avoided unless there is good reason to use it, for example, in this sentence, which focuses on 'the passive voice.'"

(A.P. Martinich, "Thomas Hobbes." The Blackwell Guide to the Modern Philosophers, ed. by Steven M. Emmanuel. Blackwell, 2001)

True Passives, Semi-Passives, and the Passive Gradient

            "The statistic from corpus analyses that four-fifths of passive sentences in texts occur without the agentive by-phrase makes a nonsense out of deriving passives from actives. In the active subjects are obligatory; there can be no active sentences without a subject. So where do all these passives with no agent come from whereby the agent is unknown? Not from an underlying active, obviously. It is common practice to assume a dummy subject in such cases, equivalent to 'someone,' i.e. underlying My house was burgled is the sentenceSomeone burgled my house. But that is stretching a point beyond credibility


SUMBER : http://grammar.about.com/od/pq/g/pasvoiceterm.htm