grammar

               

Voice (grammar)

      In grammar, the voice of a verb, also called diathesis /daɪˈæθəsɪs/ and (rarely) the gender of a verb,^[2] describes the relationship between the action (or state) that the verb expresses and the participants identified 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 subject is the patient, target or undergoer of the action, the verb is said to be in the passive voice.

For example, in the sentence:

The cat ate the mouse.

the verb "ate" is in the active voice. However, in the sentence:

The mouse was eaten by the cat.

the verbal phrase "was eaten" is passive.

In the sentence:

The hunter killed the bear.

the verb "killed" is in the active voice, and the doer of the action is the "hunter". A passive version of the sentence is:

The bear was killed by the hunter.

where the verbal phrase "was killed" is followed by the word "by" and then by the doer "hunter".

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) complement. 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.          

Active

Further information: Active voice

The active voice is the most commonly 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.

Example: Kabaisa ate the potatoes.

The verb ate indicates the active voice. But consider the following sentence which is in passive voice:

The potatoes were eaten by Kabaisa.

The words were eaten indicate the passive voice.

The passive voice shows that something has been acted upon by someone or something else.

Passive

Further information: Passive voice and English passive voice

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.^[5]

In the passive voice the grammatical subject of the verb is the recipient (not the doer) of the action denoted by the verb.

Some languages, such as English and Spanish, use a periphrastic passive voice; that is, it is not a single word form, but rather a construction making use of other word forms. Specifically, it is made up of a form of the auxiliary verb to be and a past participle of the main verb. In other languages, such as Latin, the passive voice is simply marked on the verb by inflection: librum legit "He reads the book"; liber legitur "The book is read".