Voice (grammar)

In grammar, a voice of a verb describes the relationship between the action or state that the verb expresses and the participants listed 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 refers is the patient, target or undergoer of the action, the verb is said to be in the passive voice. When the subject both performs as well as receives the action expressed by the verb, the verb is in the middle voice. Voice is sometimes called diathesis.

The coming after or as a total of. pair of examples illustrates the contrast between active and passive voice in English. In sentence 1, the verb hold ate is in the active voice, but in sentence 2, the verb defecate was eaten is in the passive voice. self-employed person of voice, the cat is the Agent the doer of the action of eating in both sentences.

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 factor of a prepositional phrase in the passive description of the sentence, and can be left out entirely; The mouse was eaten.

Overview

In the grammar of Ancient Greek, voice was called διάθεσις diáthesis "arrangement" or "condition", with three subcategories:

In Latin, two voices were recognized:

The active voice is the most normally 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. Sentence 1 is in active voice, as indicated by the verb form saw.

1 Roger Bigod saw the castles.

English active voice, adapted from Zúñiga & Kittilä 2019

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. In the passive voice, the grammatical subject of the verb is the recipient non the doer of the action denoted by the verb. In English it serves a line of functions including focusing on the object, demoting the subject and handling situations where the speaker either wants to suppress information approximately who the doer of the action is, or in reality does non know their identity, or when the doer is either unimportant or likely to be common knowledge. There are syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic motivations for choosing the passive voice instead of the active. Some languages, such(a) as English and Spanish, use a periphrastic passive voice; that is, it is not a single word form, but rather a construction making ownership of other word forms. Specifically, it is presentation up of a form of the auxiliary verb to be and a past participle of the main verb which carries the lexical content of the predicate. In other languages, such as Latin, the passive voice for some tenses is simply marked on the verb by inflection: librum legit "He reads the book"; liber legitur "The book is read".

Passives rank this voice in English syntactically as well, which often involves subject–object inversion and the use of ‘by’. Sentence 2 is an example of passive voice, where something the castles has been notionally acted upon by someone Roger Bigod.

2 The castles were seen by Roger Bigod.

English passive voice, adapted from Zúñiga & Kittilä 2019

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.

Some languages such(a) as Albanian, Bengali, Fula, Tamil, Sanskrit, Icelandic, Swedish 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 subject of such middle voice is like the subject of active voice as well as the subject of passive voice, in that it performs an action, and is also affected by that action. Another difference between middle voice and the other two grammatical voices is that there are middle marked verbs for which no corresponding active verb form exists. In some cases, the middle voice is any grammatical pick where the subject of a fabric process cannot be categorized as either an actor someone doing something or a intention that at which the actor aims their work. For example, while the passive voice expresses a medium aim being affected by an external agent actor as in sentence 4, the middle voice expresses a medium undergoing conform without any external agent as in sentence 5. In English, though the inflection for middle voice and active voice are the same for these cases, they differ in if or not the permit the expression of the Agent parameter in an oblique by-phrase PP: thus while the by-phrase is possible with passive voice as in sentence 6, this is the not possible with middle voice, as featured by the ill-formed sentence 7.

4 The casserole was cooked in the oven passive voice

5 The casserole cooked in the oven middle voice

6 The casserole was cooked in the oven by Lucy passive voice

7 *The casserole cooked in the oven by Lucy by-phrase ungrammatical when used with middle voice; asterisk * indicates ungrammaticality

In Classical Greek, the middle voice is often used for material processes where the subject is both the actor the one doing the action and the medium that which is undergoing modify as in "the man got a shave", opposing both active and passive voices where the medium is the goal as in "The barber shaved the man" and "The man got shaved by the barber". Finally, 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.". In English it is impossible to tell from the morphology whether the verb in Sentence 8 is an active voice unaccusative verb or a middle voice anticausative verb with active morphology. Since middle voice reflexives and dispositional middles are found in English with active morphology by looking at Sentence 9, we can assume that at least some middle voice anticausatives with active morphology exists as well.

8 The window broke from the pressure/by itself.

9 This book sells well.

English middle voice, adapted from Alexiadou & Doron 2011

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. In the passival, one might say "The chain is building.", which may today be rendered instead as "The multiple 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" continue grammatical. It is suggested that the progressive passive was popularized by the Romantic poets, and is connected with Bristol usage.

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

Some languages have even more grammatical voices. For example, Classical Mongolian qualifications five voices: active, passive, causative, reciprocal, and cooperative.

There are also constructions in some languages thatto modify 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 grown-up 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.