The Passive in English (2011)
languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu
languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu
But it got me thinking, it must all be relative. Can native speakers of a language even think they have deponent verbs without having another language to compare to?
English has "to be born". You could argue that it's passive (the active is "to bear"), but it's not how the word is used. But French has the active "naître" as "to be born". Does that mean French speakers think that English has deponent verbs?
The case of 'naître' is interesting. Naître is mostly used in the past (I/he was born). The direct translation is also in French its common past form 'Je suis né', which would also be the same as a passive voice, though in the present ('I am born' but the meaning wouldn't make much sense in French).
In the end, 'I was born' appears very logical to young French students (typically 9 to 12 years old depending on school and chosen language). It's usually taught at first as idiomatic.
Follow-up question for German speakers: I was sometimes asked 'When were you born?' as 'Wann bist du geboren?' which would be a word-for-word translation of the English. Is 'Wann wurdest du geboren?' with the passive auxiliary the only really correct form?
It's easy enough to just flip subject and object when translating, but I never gave much thought to how it would work in the passive voice.
I tried a few examples with Google Translate, but perhaps it's even more confused than I am:
I miss him. => Il me manque.
He misses me. => Il me manque.
I am missed by him => Il me manque.
He is missed by me. => Il me manque.I'd expect French and Italian to be similar here.
>'Il me manque' = 'he's missing to me' This seems logical to me. The French 'me' in this case is a dative or 'indirect object' form.
>He's missing me (while shooting at me) = il me manque The French 'me' in this case is an accusative or 'direct object' form.
The passive voice 'Je suis manqué par lui' = 'I am missed by him' /'Il est manqué par moi' = 'He is missed by me' would be unusual in French and necessarily 'directly transitive', so referring to missing someone with a pistol for example.
The difference between the two can be made by using the 3rd person or the indirect complement. >Il me manque (I long for him) => Il lui manque (he/she misses him, the dative 'lui' being epicene) >Il me manque (He missed me, as with a pistol) => il le manque (he misses him, as with a pistol)
'Il me manque' (I long for him) can be developed into 'Il manque à moi' (he's missing to me). 'Il me manque' (he misses me while shooting at me) cannot. This intuitive trick is taught to children so they can make the difference in more complicated cases, but it doesn't work well with second language students.
I miss him => Il me manque.
He misses me => Je lui manque.
Passive forms aren't used. However you may use the quite old-fashioned "languir" as an alternative form:
I am missed by him => Il se languit de moi.
He is missed by me => Je me languit de lui.
Both “bist geboren” and “wurdest geboren” are in wide-spread use, some German speakers prefer the one, some the other variant – e.g. https://dict.leo.org/forum/viewGeneraldiscussion.php?idThrea... – but not under all circumstances:
- “wurdest geboren”: the passive with an auxiliary form of “werden” is called “Vorgangspassiv” ≈ ‘passive expressing an event’.
- “bist geboren”: the passive with an auxiliary form of “sein” is called “Zustandspassiv” ≈ ‘passive expressing a state’.
A minimal pair:
- “Die Tür wird geöffnet” = ‘The door is opened’.
- “Die Tür ist geöffnet” ≈ ‘The door (has been opened and) is open’ (There is also “Die Tür ist offen” = ‘The door is open’).
So “wurdest geboren” and “bist geboren” offer two different perspectives (with a difference that often doesnʼt really matter):
- “Wann wurdest du geboren?” focuses on the past event of having been born at a certain time.
- “Wann bist du geboren?” focuses on the personʼs property to be now a person that was born at a certain time (a property, in the end, like age or weight maybe).
So the latter is rather not used for dead persons: “Kant wurde 1724 geboren” is much preferred over “Kant ist 1724 geboren”.
(If students of the German language donʼt want to memorize much here, they can, as often with German, happily apply the postmodern motto “anything goes”, plus there is probably some dialect anyway in which the form you use is the right one since the middle ages :-)
Yes: it’s all based on the syntax of the single language in question. Latin has very distinct active and passive conjugations [0]; we know they’re active and passive because of the effect they have on the case assignations. Deponent verbs are those which cannot occur in the active conjugations.
More generally, categories like ‘deponent’ have to be justified language-internally. If you can only identify a category with reference to another language, it’s probably not of any relevance in the grammar of the language you’re studying [1].
[0] There’s a nice table in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_conjugation#Regular_conj...
[1] https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511810206.006 is an excellent overview of this, though unfortunately paywalled.
That makes more sense. I learned deponent as "Active meaning, passive conjugation". It's only the "meaning" part that I think is subjective and/or relative.
> That makes more sense.
It's also not quite correct; Latin deponent verbs don't have finite active forms, or active infinitives, but they may have active participles.
As to whether it makes sense to distinguish "active meaning" from the form of the verb...
There is an important piece of Latin syntax exclusively available to deponent verbs, which justifies the description of "active meaning".
Latin has three tenses, past, present, and future. An ordinary Latin verb has a full set of active and passive forms for each of two aspects in each tense.
But a Latin verb only has four participles. They are traditionally known as: present active, perfect passive, future active, and future passive. This is a far cry from the twelve you'd expect. (3 tenses × 2 aspects × 2 voices.) We'll ignore aspect, but the fact that the active voice is missing in the "past tense" in Latin's participial system has a very interesting consequence.
The Latin verb sequor means "follow". It is deponent, and you might choose to think of it as meaning "be led". However, its perfect participle secutus might mean one of two things:
1. It could mean "having followed", a perfect active participial form which is not available to non-deponent Latin verbs. On the analysis where there's no such thing as "active meaning", this is the only interpretation that it should be possible for secutus to have. If sequi [present passive infinitive] means "to follow" and not "to be followed", then secutus [perfect passive participle] should mean "having followed" and not "having been followed".
2. But in fact secutus might also mean "having been followed", passivizing the meaning of the already-grammatically-passive verb. This strongly suggests that native speakers of Latin thought of sequor in terms similar to "passive form, active meaning".
The other reason you might think of deponents as having "active meaning" is that they take direct objects. This is a weaker line of argument, since it's possible for a verb to take multiple direct objects, so there's no real problem with the passive form of such a verb (with two original objects) promoting one of them to subject and keeping the other one as an object.
Compare English "I was given a gift", where I is promoted from its position as primary direct object in "[He] gave me a gift", versus "A gift was given to me", where the only direct object of "[He] gave a gift to me" is promoted.
Can you please explain? I don't see this verb being used in active voice almost at all.
Yes, passive voice, but active meaning. Which was why I was suggesting it was deponent.
"He was born; he lived; he died" <- Three clauses describing what he (actively) did.
If it were active voice: "His mother bore him".
"To get married" might be analyzed as a deponent verb too, but you can also say it's parallel to "to get ready".
Some regional dialects of British English allow the use of “stood” for “standing”. E.g., “he is stood over there” = “he is standing over there”.
Likewise for “sit”: “we were sat by the bar” = “we were sitting by the bar”.
I don’t know if those technically count as deponent verbs, but they look a bit like them.
“[T]he people who criticize the passive the most tend to use it more than the rest of us. George Orwell warns against the passive in his dishonest and rhetorically overblown essay "Politics and the English language". E. B. White does likewise in the obnoxiously ignorant little book by Strunk that he revised and put his name on, The Elements of Style. Both of these authors have a remarkably high frequency of passives in their work: more than 20 percent of their clauses with transitive verbs are cast in the passive, a distinctly higher frequency than you find in most of the prose written by normal people who don't spend their time pontificating hypocritically about the alleged evil of the passive.”
[1] is a funeral with Hawaiian shirts, [2] is a funeral but likely not as you know one.
Anyway, I don’t see how those links disprove my point? Those cultures have different expectations; and my point is that those expectations are valid.
Last time I checked in at /r/linguistics that covered more than just your tacit assumption of the world at large.
Your point also seems to be both that cultures have expectations and that those that do not meet those expectations will receive criticism (that would be wrong to shrug off as "merely judgemental").
As someone who's travelled widely in the past few decades across a number of cultures I've frequently stood out like the only person in black in a sea of Hawaiian shirts; it's rare that I've been criticised, more common to have been thanked for attending.
I find communities that critically judge differences to their expectations to be relatively rare, many communities recognise that others have other behaviours, I myself do find that those communities with a rigid set of expectations that are overly judgemental of those that do not meet those expectations to be worrisome.
For example, the habitual be isn't part of any prescribed English dialect, but it still has its own grammar, and can be used correctly or incorrectly. The goal of descriptivism here is not to say "you can say anything you want, and others have to accept you", but rather to say "dialects spring up organically, and our job is to study them as they arise, rather than to define them from the top down".
Needless to say, the UK branch got closed down.
Your analogy with funeral attire and Hawaiian shirts is excellent.
That said, whenever I hear or read "begs the question" when "raises the question" is meant, it feels like nails on chalkboard. If more people recognized actual question begging our politicians and pundits would have to work harder to lie.
Apparently, one can be a centrist on the prescriptivism-descriptivism axis
> It’s one thing to understand that wearing dark formal attire to a funeral is just a part of etiquette without intrinsic meaning; it’s a whole nother matter to come to a funeral in a Hawaiian shirt and dismiss all criticism as judgmental.
In this analogy, linguists are the ones who try to figure out why people like you tend to wear dark clothes to a funeral, why other groups do not, and how those distinctions occurred. Peevers are the ones who insist that all good people wear dark clothes to funerals, ill-bred mongrels wear other kinds of clothing to funerals, and resist any notion that their culture is not universal.
Moving back to linguistics: Linguists understand people have linguistic preferences. Linguists have linguistic preferences. Linguists are opposed to people dressing up their preferences as laws of nature and insisting that everyone must speak according to those preferences. Going back to physics: A physicist may wish for perpetual motion, but a crank insists they have it and demands everyone hail them as the inventor of the perpetual motion device.
I smiled. Brilliantly played.
https://fair.org/home/copspeak-7-ways-journalists-use-police...
The confirmation is in [1]: many journalists and writers don't even know how to define the passive. It is a sad thing to watch.
The bigger lesson, which students who keep working at writing learn, is to be aware that active and passive exist and that it's worth keeping an eye out for sentences that read better with one or the other.
But, for whatever reason, high school students use way the fuck too much passive voice, and they use it inappropriately. If the only rule you can get them to internalize is "stop using passive voice", that helps a ton. It stops being a "rule" if you know what you're doing, but they don't.
Source: I'm close with a few English teachers, and with some authors.
I write in English about German bureaucracy for non-native speakers from all over the world. Using active voice in the second person makes instructions far clearer if you have a tenuous grasp of the language. You know exactly who does what.
I also find active sentences easier to parse in languages I'm not fluent in.
In non-fiction (especially journalism) it's frustrating when it's used to hide who did the action.
..or..
In non-fiction (especially journalism) it's frustrating when the writer uses it to hide who did the action.
To get this clarity with active voice we need to replace "the writer" with a pronoun, like "someone" or "anyone", but it is just ugly.
So to my mind there is no silver bullet, no simple ways to do it right in all cases. It depends.
I must admit, that's a new one on me.
On the other hand, sections 2 through 7 of the article really just belabor the same point made in section 1. If I just say "wow, 7 sections!" and stop reading, then, sure, it looks like the concept really is very difficult to explain. But when I read all those sections, I don't feel convinced anymore.
Apparently many people who are supposed to know how, don't. Take a look at the "terrible example" the article links to in section 5:
(That - and the drastic tone lacking justifications - indicates a probable intention to joke...)
Using passive voice for my original comment was tongue-in-cheek.
FTFY