The passive in English (2011)
languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu
languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu
I've tried to read this sentence so many times. That parenthetical is a doozy.
Pick a random sentence from discussion on tax laws or building an npm package, and they will sound just as ridiculous (or even pompous) to outsiders.
1. Slavic languages have several ways to construct "impersonal sentences" that can be used to describe the results of actions or being in a certain state without mentioning the actors. They sound completely natural and are used in common spoken speech.
2. Passive does sound more complicated and marked in English. Descriptions often need to use either passive voice or "fake" subjects (e.g.: "It was raining").
2. In Chinese, true passive voice ("被/叫/...") is extremely uncommon and is used mostly for negative things like "was hit by a car". Some linguists even call it an "adversity marker". And for neutral things like "The package was delivered yesterday" typical constructions look more like "The package is yesterday-delivered", with the "yesterday-delivered" construction acting almost like an adjective.
I got:
* The report was written yesterday.
* The committee approved the proposal.
* The door was open when I arrived.
* The window was broken during the storm.
* The window was broken when we bought the house.
* Mistakes were made.
* The system is designed to fail safely.
* The results are surprising.
* The patient was examined and released.
* The data suggests the model was trained improperly.
* There were several errors identified in the report.
* The system appears to have been compromised.
I got two of them wrong, though I think "partially passive" is a total cop-out.
I just realized that there's a delightful bit of ambiguity here.
Was the window damaged during the storm (and so the water got onto the carpet), or was the window damaged _by_ the storm?
Being so pedantic, and then saying "but I'm not going to use the technical term voice" is particularly off-putting. If this is an article about grammatical pedentry, let's go all the way. Otherwise, the author should focus on providing useful advice.
But this particular article rubs me the wrong way, for whatever reason. It just seems to miss the point.
Click around, you're in for a treat.
"The bus blew up" is a perfectly active clause. "The bus" is the subject, it did its own blowing-up.
"The bus was blown up" is a passive clause. "The bus" is the object, some unnamed entity acted on the bus.
Is that passive?
If you think that couldn't happen, you never rode in my 2011 Audi A6 that blew up on the Ike, and that I parked in a CPD parking lot, flames jumping out from under the hood, and walked away from like a fucking Batman villain, clicking the key fob just to hear it go "beep-boop-beep" one last time.
When the commenter above says "functionally passive", he is getting at something that lies outside of any strict grammatical sense. It is not a matter of ASTs, IRs, or anything of the like. It might be less confusing to phrase this as "spiritually passive". We're using "passive" not in the technical sense but in the normal, colloquial meaning of the word.
Normal people often use the grammatical term "passive voice" to casually mean "this sentence does that 'passive' thing where it omits key info about agency and responsibility". This casual usage makes a lot of sense, because the technical "passive" is our most useful tell for the spiritual "passive". Granted, anyone who takes a moment to think it over can see that there are counterexamples, and that this tell is merely a loose correlation, not an ironclad correspondence. Normal people are okay with this sort of situation.
Pedants are within their rights to be annoyed by this usage (and perhaps genuinely confused, though I doubt that this is common). There is certainly no law against being angry or snide whenever a word has multiple, related meanings. But TFA is just plain wrong when it claims that the passive voice "has nothing to do with lacking energy or initiative, or assuming a receptive and non-directive role." It is entirely related -- by correlation. Correlations are not foolproof logical rules, but people can see them and use them.
Moreover, normal people can see when Orwell or Strunk & White point out a correlation. They can read intelligently to understand what Orwell and Strunk & White really meant, and how it applies to actual headlines and sentences. And finally, they can read Pullum here call Orwell's essay "overblown", and decide for themselves whether Orwell is overstating the dangers of official language, how it can serve to dehumanize and deflect, or whether, more likely, Pullum is overstating this stupid nitpick about what "passive voice" ackshually means.
As to this new link...what a load a willful misrepresentations. Misses the point entirely. The rules in PatEL are not literal laws. They are merely pointing the way toward something.
For example, from the very top:
> So, Orwell writes "it is generally assumed", which is passive. Why didn't he say "people generally assume", or "we generally assume", both of which are perfectly grammatical...
Beaver's proposed variants are also passive, spiritually, in my sense above. Who is "we"? A good author chooses between these not based on which one is literally passive, but on other considerations like flow and sound.
Maybe there are Orwell fans out there who have read PatEL too literally, and need to be disabused? Maybe this blog is good for those kinds of people? But from what I've seen so far of LL, it's a bunch of smug dunks that nobody asked for.
As I said in a different comment, I'll try to come back to LL with an open mind some other time, hopefully on a different topic.
You could simply say "You must be clear who did what" and it would be as good an advice as any, but people have to shove in "passive" into the advice, which serves no purpose and just makes things more confusing.
English lacks a formal middle and there is a good deal of established literature on verbal aspects where the subject is not really the agent called "ergative".
There is utility in comparing "the bus exploded", perhaps unclear as to the agent, but language is not an agent game. It's trying to convey information, which is clear enough in these cases.
The headlines read "Hamas terrorists fire rockets at Israel, killing tens" and the other headlines read "Missiles were shot at Gaza" and "Thousands of Palestinians were killed" [corrected]. Who did that? Nobody knows!
"Thousands of Palestinians killed" is in passive. "Rockets were fired at Israel" would be as well.
"Missiles were shot at Gaza" is passive and avoids specifying agency. "Someone shot missiles at Gaza" is active and avoids specifying agency. "Missiles were fired at Gaza by Israel" is passive and specifies agency. Sometimes you don't even need a placeholder: "Missiles hit Gaza" is active and avoids agency.
It is understood by basically everybody that there are two different things meant by passive vs. active: on one hand, the technical grammatical distinction, and on the other, the broader spirit of the phrase. Edge cases are very easy to construct: passive clauses where the agency is well-identified, and active clauses where responsibility is totally diffuse. This technical clarification is needed by nobody, because a rule-of-thumb like "avoid passive voice" is meant to be used holistically, not literally.
At the end, a parting shot is fired at George Orwell and E.B. White. Naturally, the superior intellect of the author of TFA is driven home.