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In grammar, the voice (aka diathesis) of a verb describes the relationship between the action (or state) that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its verb argument (subject, object, etc.). When the subject is the agent or doer of the action, the verb is in the active voice. When the subject is the patient, target or undergoer of the action, the verb is said to be in the passive voice. When the subject both performs and receives the action expressed by the verb, the verb is in the middle voice.
The following pair of examples illustrates the contrast between active and passive voice in English. In sentence (1), the verb form ate is in the active voice, but in sentence (2), the verb form was eaten is in the passive voice. Independent 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 part of a prepositional phrase in the passive version of the sentence, and can be left out entirely; The mouse was eaten.
In Latin, two voices were recognized:
(1) Roger Bigod saw the castles.
Passives mark 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.
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 option where the subject of a material process cannot be categorized as either an actor (someone doing something) or a goal (that at which the actor aims their work). For example, while the passive voice expresses a medium (goal) being affected by an external agent (actor) as in sentence (4), the middle voice expresses a medium undergoing change 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 whether or not they permit the expression of the Agent argument in an oblique by-phrase PP: thus while the by-phrase is possible with passive voice as in sentence (6), it is not possible with middle voice, as shown 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 language, 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 change) 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.Hale & Keyser 1993 Since middle voice reflexives and dispositional middles are found in English with active morphology by looking at Sentence (9), it can be assumed that at least some middle voice anticausatives with active morphology exist as well.Alexiadou, A., & Doron, E. (2011). The syntactic construction of two non-active Voices: Passive and middle. Journal of Linguistics, 48(1), 1-34
(8) The window broke from the pressure/by itself.
(9) This book sells well.
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 modern English.Mike Vuolo, "The House is Building"? Why you never learned the passival tense, even though it used to be proper English grammar., Slate, May 29, 2012 In the passival, one might say "The house is building.", which may today be rendered instead as "The house is being built." Likewise "The meal is eating.", which is now "The meal is being eaten." The similar "Fred is shaving" and "The meal is cooking" remain grammatical. It is suggested that the progressive passive was popularized by the Romantic poets, and is connected with Bristol usage.Platt and Denison, " The language of the Southey-Coleridge Circle", Language Sciences 2000
Many in Latin (i.e., verbs passive in form but active in meaning) are descendants of the Proto-Indo-European middle voice.Sihler, Andrew L, " New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin", 1995, Oxford University Press
There are also constructions in some languages that appear to change 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 person or animacy hierarchy (or a combination of both): 1 > 2 > 3 or Anim > Inan and so forth. E.g., in Fox language (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:
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.
“Ba” is a coverb, not a preposition. It is a three-place predicate that subcategorizes for a subject, an object, and a VP complement.Her, O. (2009). Unifying the long passive and the short passive: On the bei construction in taiwan mandarin. Language and Linguistics (Taipei), 10(3), 421-470.
This Ba construction is also a direct opposition of active voice in passive voice in Mandarin (i.e. Ba construction (= active voice) vs. Bei construction (= passive voice)).
The following sentence b) is in contrast to sentence a).
(The first line is in Traditional Chinese while the second is Simplified Chinese)
corresponds to the following sentence using passive voice. The agent phrase is optional.
In addition, through the addition of the auxiliary verb "to be" 是 ( shì) the passive voice is frequently used to emphasize the identity of the actor. This example places emphasis on the dog, presumably as opposed to some other animal:
Mandarin also has an object-retaining passive which contains both the object and the topic (mostly the possessor of the object):
被 (bèi) as a passive marker is a relatively new addition to the language, introduced as part of the early 20th century language reforms that also added gender-specific pronouns such as 他>她 and 你>妳 and culminated in attempts to Romanize Chinese entirely. There is a typical passive construction in Mandarin, namely Bei construction. It is commonly used to indicate result, direction, location, frequency, duration, manner, and appearance. (2025). 9781315732930 ISBN 9781315732930 Similar to English, Bei construction can also be analysed by A-movement which is locally restricted. The subject of the Bei clause is included in the complement clause where the “passivized” object controls the verb. Classically, 被 marked an adversative mood, indicating that something bad had happened. Even today, the following sentence is perfectly acceptable in speech:
Recent development of bèi construction
Recently, more syntacticians investigated passive voice in Mandarin. They discovered that passive voice in Mandarin is heavily dependent on the context of the sentence rather than the grammatical forms. Therefore, passive voice can be marked (e.g. by the most broadly used passive marker: bèi 被 mentioned) or unmarked (see the "Notional passive" section below) in both speech and writing. Those sentences have a passive marker called the long passive, while the ones that do not require a passive marker are called short passive.
Here are examples for long passive and short passive:
(Both examples are adapted from Huang, C. J., & Liu, N. (2014))
We can see from the examples above, the difference between long passive and short passive depends on whether the agent phrase is presented or not.
Bei construction was not often used in Old Chinese, but it is widely used in Modern Chinese. The appearance of Bei construction marks that Modern Chinese is undergoing a new cycle of change. Old Chinese was considerably synthetic and has been gradually changed to analyticity. Later its development peaked during Tang-Song Dynasties. Nowadays, in Modern Chinese, it is mainly analytic but also shows forward tendency toward synthesis. Here are some recent theories that syntacticians have proposed.
Here is an example of showing a sentence having different selectional properties in its subject and object:
Lisi11 ]]]
(This example is adapted from Ting, J. (1998))
Here is an example of notional passive:
In other voices in Mandarin, “object + transitive verb” construction is usually used. However, “topic + explanatory comment” is the common structure for notional passive. There is no surface passive marker in the sentence, but the underlying meaning does carry a passive voice.
The negation of notional passive is similar to English negation. Both are achieved by adding the negator “mei(you)没(有)” right before the transitive verb. In fact, in negation, “le” is no longer necessary in the sentence.
Here is an example of negation of notional passive:
(Both examples are adapted from Yip et al. (2016), Chapter 13)
Most objects present in notional passive are inanimate objects because ambiguity can arise if we use animate objects in these sentences. To avoid this problem, formal or lexical passive markers will be introduced in the sentence.
Here is an example of formal passive:
(Example is adapted from Yip et al. (2016), Chapter 13)
There is a striking feature of formal passive which makes it different from other forms of passives. The formal passive is presented as including “bei” as a co-verb in sentence and acting as a formal passive marker. “Bei” indicates the subject of the sentence is the action receiver. The initiator of this action is usually presented after “bei”. But this initiator could be overt (unstated), covert (revealed), or vague.
Here is some examples of showing different identities in initiators:
(These are adapted from Yip et al. (2016) Chapter 13, p. 253)
Although the most common formal passive marker is “bei”, it can also be replaced by rang让, jiao教, gei给, etc. The identity of the initiator is either overt or vague. “Bei” cannot be used in imperatives, but other formal passive markers can be used in colloquialism.
Here is an example of lexical passive:
(Example is adapted from Yip et al. (2016), Chapter 13)
The syntactic structure of lexical passive is SVO:
The semantic formula: receiver + verb + initiator + nominalised verb. (No additional complement to the nominalised verb is allowed.)
In nominal and formal passives, the focus is on the outcome of the action, but for lexical passive, the focus has shifted to emphasize the degree of the action that has been carried out. In other words, the focus is on the initiator and nominalised verb.
However, Li et al. (1981), when arguing against Chao's analysis of Mandarin, stated that there is a distinct class of middle voice verbs. They recognize that Mandarin (and Cantonese) verbs as a whole behave the same way. Later, Li et al. (1981) introduced middle voice sentences as examples of topic/comment constructions which lacks an overt subject.Li, Charles N.; Thompson, Sandra A. (1981). Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar. Berkeley: University of California Press. .
Here is an example:
(Adapted from Li et al. (1981))
We can see from this example that the characteristic of a topic/comment construction in its implication of a dropped anaphor indicates an agent.
While Ting (2006) compared between middles and Ba constructions (= active voice) involving intransitive V-de (得) resultatives. He also did comparison between middles and inchoatives. He argues that we can treat notional passives in Mandarin as middle constructions. Its underlying grammatical subject position and lack of a syntactically active logical subject are best explained by a presyntactic approach. But, semantically, Chinese middle voice may be interpreted like stative or verbal passives.Ting, J. (2006). The middle construction in mandarin chinese and the presyntactic approach. Concentric: Studies in Linguistics, 32(1), 89-117.
Here are two examples:
(Both examples are adapted from Ting (2006))
Ting argues that sentence a) is ungrammatical and indistinguishable from ergatives, and that sentence b) is grammatical and he believes that it must have used middle voice due to their function of defocusing an agent subject. Although Bei construction in passive voice can achieve the same purpose, there is a possibility that associating with Bei construction may be inappropriate in many contexts. Thus, using middle voice is better in this case.
Due to the ongoing discussion, we still don't have a uniformed theory in middle voice in Mandarin.
However, in some dialects of Yue Chinese, a passive voice with an optional agent phrase is also available:
Qinzhou (Qin-Lian Yue):
In the actor-emphasizing passive voice of Cantonese, besides the addition of the auxiliary verb "to be" 係 ( hai6), the perfective event is also converted to an adjective-like predicative with the suffix 嘅 ( ge3) or 㗎 ( gaa3), which is a more emphasized one from the liaison of 嘅 ( ge3) and 啊 ( aa3):
This is an example of a corresponding active voice and direct passive voice sentence.
Active Voice
Direct Passive
(Both examples are adapted from Shibatani et al. (2017))
Word order in Japanese is more flexible so active voice sentences can be both SOV (subject + object + verb) and OSV (object + subject + verb) order; however, SOV is typically used more often.
Active SOV sentence example:
Active OSV sentence example
(Both examples are adapted from Tanaka et al. (2011))
Examples of passive voice in Japanese:
Direct passive examples:
(Examples are adapted from Shibatani et al. (2017))
In all 3 examples the auxiliary verb (ra)reru is used as a suffix to the active forms of the verb to show the meaning of the direct passive. (2025). 9781614517672, Walter de Gruyter Inc.. ISBN 9781614517672
Indirect (possessive) passive
The subject in possessive passives is in a canonical possessive relation such as kinship, ownership, etc. with the direct object.
(This example was adapted from Shibatani et al. (2017))
In this example of a possessive passive there is a kinship relation between the grammatical subject which is 'Ken' and the direct object which is the 'musuko' (son).
Indirect (gapless) passive
Gapless passives unlike possessive passives lack an active counterpart and contain an extra argument that is unlicensed by the main verb. The extra argument is also realized as the grammatical subject.
Ni-yotte passive examples:
(This example is adapted from Shibatani et al. (2017))
In addition, as seen in example 2) can also be used more generally to introduce a cause. This because the in is a form of the verb yor-u which means 'owe'. (2025). 9781614517672, Walter de Gruyter Inc.. ISBN 9781614517672
Unlike indirect and direct passive with ni-phrases, ni-yotte phrases are not indigenous to Japanese and were created as a way to translate modern Dutch texts because direct translations did not exist.
1) Direct passive
Internal direct passive sentence:
Paul are ta]
2) Indirect passive
Internal indirect passive sentence:
Paul are ta]
(These example is adapted from Toyota (2011).
In these examples we can see that the passive morpheme is outside of the embedded sentence which shows that is part of the underlying structure for both direct and indirect passives.
1) Direct Passive
In non-uniform theory is not contained within the underlying structure so in this sentence is the result of a subject object shift.
2) Indirect Passive
For indirect passive sentences is contained within the underlying structure (This example is adapted from Toyota (2011).
In other languages, the subject is omitted and a specific impersonal form of the verb is used.
In Estonian, the agent can be included by using the postposition poolt, although using such a construction instead of the active voice is criticized as a foreignism (influenced by German, Russian and English) and characteristic of officialese.
In both Finnish and Estonian, the use of the impersonal voice generally implies that the agent is capable of own initiative . For example, Finnish Ikkuna hajotettiin. ("The window was broken.") would generally not be used if the window was broken by the wind, rather than a person. In the latter case, one could instead use a reflexive verb (anticausative) verb in the active voice, such as Ikkuna hajosi. ("The window broke.").
It is similar to the use of the pronoun on in French (except wherever on is instead used an alternative to "we", which is very frequent). It increasingly corresponds to the passive in modern English, in which there is a trend towards avoiding the use of the passive unless it is specifically required to omit the subject. It also appears to be similar to the "fourth person" mentioned in the preceding paragraph. However, what is called in Irish an briathar saor or the free verb does not suggest passivity but a kind of generalized agency.
The construction has equal validity in transitive and intransitive clauses, and the best translation into English is normally by using the "dummy" subjects "they", "one", or impersonal "you". For example, the common sign against tobacco consumption has its closest direct translation in English as "No smoking":
An example of its use as an intransitive is:
The difference between the autonomous and a true passive is that while the autonomous focuses on the action and overtly avoids mentioning the actor, there is nonetheless an anonymous agent who may be referred to in the sentence. For instance:
In English, the formation of the passive allows the optional inclusion of an agent in a prepositional phrase, "by the man", etc. Where English would leave out the noun phrase, Irish uses the autonomous; where English includes the noun phrase, Irish uses its periphrastic passive – which can also leave out the noun phrase:
The impersonal endings have been re-analysed as a passive voice in Modern Welsh and the agent can be included after the preposition gan ():
For some speakers of English the dynamic passive constructed with get is not accepted and is considered colloquial or sub-standard.
The vara passive is often synonymous with, and sometimes preferable to, simply using the corresponding adjective:
The bli passive is often synonymous with, and sometimes preferable to, the s-passive:
However, this construction is very unidiomatic. The usual passive voice is the se pasiva, in which the verb is conjugated in the active voice, but preceded by the se particle:
Estar is used to form what might be termed a static passive voice (not regarded as a passive voice in traditional Spanish grammar; it describes a state that is the result of an action):
In the ser and estar cases, the verb's participle is used as the complement (as is sometimes the case in English).
Dynamic passive auxiliary verb: essere and venire ( to be and to come)
Static passive auxiliary verb: essere (to be)
Static forms represents much more a property or general condition, whereas the dynamic form is a real passive action entailing "by someone":
A particular language may use the same construction for several voices, such as the same form for passive and reflexive.
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