hi i need help in answering these questions about passive
first why we use passive voice on academic writting, fiction, speech and news i need analyze to this?
did the passive voice use alot on conversation? which kind ? and why?
when do native speaker use passive and why? which kind
passive voice
Moderators: Dimitris, maneki neko2, Lorikeet, Enrico Palazzo, superpeach, cecil2, Mr. Kalgukshi2
-
abufletcher
- Posts: 162
- Joined: Fri Mar 10, 2006 8:12 pm
These are excellent questions, but unfortunately the answers are anything but simple. A lot of work has been done on passive use by people within corpus linguistics working on genre analysis. Maybe someone here can offer a reference or two for this work. Below are a couple of interesting "soon to be released" books:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/019530 ... e&n=283155
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/902722 ... e&n=283155
The easiest part of the question is that passive is often used in academic writing to impart an "impersonal" tone that is supposed to make the writing sound more objective. However, recently there has been a move to reduce excessive use of the passive as this is now deemed to be "poor stylistics." Even Word's grammar-check feature often flags awkward (though grammatically correct) passive use.
Another reason that passives are particularly common in science writing is that an agent may not always be necessary or relevant:
"The solution was brought to a temperture of 42 degees Celsius. It was then transfered to a large beaker and placed in a cooling vat."
Passive is less common in conversational language but even here there are many very high frequency passives, for example, "I was told that..."
So no easy answers here. Only great questions.
Salaam!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/019530 ... e&n=283155
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/902722 ... e&n=283155
The easiest part of the question is that passive is often used in academic writing to impart an "impersonal" tone that is supposed to make the writing sound more objective. However, recently there has been a move to reduce excessive use of the passive as this is now deemed to be "poor stylistics." Even Word's grammar-check feature often flags awkward (though grammatically correct) passive use.
Another reason that passives are particularly common in science writing is that an agent may not always be necessary or relevant:
"The solution was brought to a temperture of 42 degees Celsius. It was then transfered to a large beaker and placed in a cooling vat."
Passive is less common in conversational language but even here there are many very high frequency passives, for example, "I was told that..."
So no easy answers here. Only great questions.
Salaam!
-
Stephen Jones
- Posts: 1421
- Joined: Sun May 18, 2003 5:25 pm
To understand the use of the passive you need to understand the concepts of theme and focus.
The theme is what the sentence is about and normally comes at the beginning in English. 'Focus' is the new information in the sentence, and it is what is emphasized.
Now look at these two sentences:
Picasso painted "Guernica".
"Guernica" was painted by Picasso.
The first is a sentence about Picasso, and the second is a sentence about 'Guernica".
When you use the passive with an agent you are saying that the agent isthe most important thing in the sentence.
The Atzec Pyramids were constructed by people who didn't know about the wheel.
On the other hand, as abu Fletcher says, the agent is often unimportant.
The wall has been painted.
means the same as
They've painted the wall.
and you can't say
*The wall has been painted by them. though these kind of ungrammatical sentences are often found in artificial exercises written by non-native speakers, and on occasion by native speakers who should know better.
The Passive is more common in English than in Spanish for example because English normally requires a subject. So when the agent is not important we can't simply use an active sentence with no subject as you can in Spanish
Han pintado el pared
*Have painted the wall
but must either use the passive or a dummy subject.
So you have two factors to consider when dealing with the passive. Is the theme of fhe sentence different from the agent, and is the agent unknown or unimportant.
When you start looking at examples in the news or in technical writing you will see that one of the two normally suggests the use of the passive.
And remember that in writing we don't have the same means of expression we do in speech, where we can keep the active voice and express emphasis by contrastive stress.
Picasso painted "Guernica".
A guy with no arms painted this.
The theme is what the sentence is about and normally comes at the beginning in English. 'Focus' is the new information in the sentence, and it is what is emphasized.
Now look at these two sentences:
Picasso painted "Guernica".
"Guernica" was painted by Picasso.
The first is a sentence about Picasso, and the second is a sentence about 'Guernica".
When you use the passive with an agent you are saying that the agent isthe most important thing in the sentence.
The Atzec Pyramids were constructed by people who didn't know about the wheel.
On the other hand, as abu Fletcher says, the agent is often unimportant.
The wall has been painted.
means the same as
They've painted the wall.
and you can't say
*The wall has been painted by them. though these kind of ungrammatical sentences are often found in artificial exercises written by non-native speakers, and on occasion by native speakers who should know better.
The Passive is more common in English than in Spanish for example because English normally requires a subject. So when the agent is not important we can't simply use an active sentence with no subject as you can in Spanish
Han pintado el pared
*Have painted the wall
but must either use the passive or a dummy subject.
So you have two factors to consider when dealing with the passive. Is the theme of fhe sentence different from the agent, and is the agent unknown or unimportant.
When you start looking at examples in the news or in technical writing you will see that one of the two normally suggests the use of the passive.
And remember that in writing we don't have the same means of expression we do in speech, where we can keep the active voice and express emphasis by contrastive stress.
Picasso painted "Guernica".
A guy with no arms painted this.
-
abufletcher
- Posts: 162
- Joined: Fri Mar 10, 2006 8:12 pm
Stephen Jones wrote: And remember that in writing we don't have the same means of expression we do in speech, where we can keep the active voice and express emphasis by contrastive stress.
Picasso painted "Guernica".
This is an interesting point.
I still have a strong feeling though that passive use in written and spoken genres is much more complexly (and lexically) order than any "theme" vs. "focus" treatment could handle.
Another reason why Spanish may use fewer formal passives is because of the use of reflexive -se verbs in situations where English might use the passive:
"Se rompio la ventana." ("The window broke (itself)")
-
JuanTwoThree
- Posts: 947
- Joined: Tue Sep 14, 2004 11:30 am
- Location: Spain
To go on with the original questions, there are plenty of high (?) frequency passives in spoken English:
Where/When were you born?
I'm supposed/not allowed/made to..........
You're hired/fired.
Don't be fooled/taken in by......
Another thing to mention (again) is the tendency of verbs to (be) depassivize(d). I just spotted another:
"Your Amazon order dispatched today"
Where/When were you born?
I'm supposed/not allowed/made to..........
You're hired/fired.
Don't be fooled/taken in by......
Another thing to mention (again) is the tendency of verbs to (be) depassivize(d). I just spotted another:
"Your Amazon order dispatched today"
salamabufletcher wrote:These are excellent questions, but unfortunately the answers are anything but simple. A lot of work has been done on passive use by people within corpus linguistics working on genre analysis. Maybe someone here can offer a reference or two for this work. Below are a couple of interesting "soon to be released" books:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/019530 ... e&n=283155
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/902722 ... e&n=283155
The easiest part of the question is that passive is often used in academic writing to impart an "impersonal" tone that is supposed to make the writing sound more objective. However, recently there has been a move to reduce excessive use of the passive as this is now deemed to be "poor stylistics." Even Word's grammar-check feature often flags awkward (though grammatically correct) passive use.
Another reason that passives are particularly common in science writing is that an agent may not always be necessary or relevant:
"The solution was brought to a temperture of 42 degees Celsius. It was then transfered to a large beaker and placed in a cooling vat."
Passive is less common in conversational language but even here there are many very high frequency passives, for example, "I was told that..."
So no easy answers here. Only great questions.
Salaam!
thanx for trying to answer my question but really i want a help on this give me any sites which helps me on that because i have a project to submit during two weeks
give me the way to answer these questions
i will appreciate that to you sir
Last edited by morpheus on Tue May 09, 2006 3:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Ok. I can't help you with sites (besides this, whenever you need to research something, go to google.com and wikipedia.org), but I can tell you what I know. (Or what I think I know... so.. faites attention! it's never good to just take what others say at face value, anyway, without looking it up for yourself, too).
on the "social" uses of passive construction, it's normally used to place emphasis on something or someone, or to distance the speaker from what is being said. It happens a lot, a lot in scientific and academic writing, in order to distance the speaker/writer from "the truth", which is objective and stands on its own feet. I took a sociolinguistics class on language and gender last semester, and it was noted that men tended to use this passivization more often than women, particularly in academic or scientific writing. People who didn't use the passive were often judged as "unobjective" or adding unnecessary detail or just making stuff too personal.. in other words, they were stifling the feminine, and not necessarily less worthy, intuition to connect the speaker to the speech, instead of acting as if it were disconnected.
Elementary school kids are often admonished to only use the active in writing, to sound more dynamic and interesting. Indeed, it's rather dry and difficult to read something that is entirely written in the passive.
Passive construction is frequently used in daily speech and communication.. but.. like.. who really thinks about it? when you talk you just talk. think of a few common passive constructions (just the verb and aux, for example) and google it, and it should turn up thousands of hits, examples of speakers using the passive.
on passive construction, if this is what you want to know:
Emphasis is given to whatever object is moved to the subject position. I should be more sure about this next part, since it will probably be on a final exam next week, but I haven't quite gotten to the cramming and consolidating stage yet... but anyway, someone else will probably correct me here, but I believe passivization only occurs with transitive verbs, or intransitive verbs that assign a "object" role, verbs where action isn't actually initiated by the subject (these are also called unaccusitive. You can wikipedi it to make sure I'm not talking out of my ass, or to find out more). For example, I fell - I didn't actively fall, falling happened to me, so "I" am really, underlyingly, the "object". ("I" becomes the subject because English sentences require subjects, hence the dummy "It"). In French.. I'm not sure about the other romance languages, but this stems from Vulgar Latin so perhaps, in French unaccusative verbs are usually conjugated in compound tenses with etre (to be). Perhaps this will help with understanding it.
Passivization occurs far more frequently in English than in Italian or other romance languages, which use the "se" reflexive pronoun to avoid it.
on the "social" uses of passive construction, it's normally used to place emphasis on something or someone, or to distance the speaker from what is being said. It happens a lot, a lot in scientific and academic writing, in order to distance the speaker/writer from "the truth", which is objective and stands on its own feet. I took a sociolinguistics class on language and gender last semester, and it was noted that men tended to use this passivization more often than women, particularly in academic or scientific writing. People who didn't use the passive were often judged as "unobjective" or adding unnecessary detail or just making stuff too personal.. in other words, they were stifling the feminine, and not necessarily less worthy, intuition to connect the speaker to the speech, instead of acting as if it were disconnected.
Elementary school kids are often admonished to only use the active in writing, to sound more dynamic and interesting. Indeed, it's rather dry and difficult to read something that is entirely written in the passive.
Passive construction is frequently used in daily speech and communication.. but.. like.. who really thinks about it? when you talk you just talk. think of a few common passive constructions (just the verb and aux, for example) and google it, and it should turn up thousands of hits, examples of speakers using the passive.
on passive construction, if this is what you want to know:
Emphasis is given to whatever object is moved to the subject position. I should be more sure about this next part, since it will probably be on a final exam next week, but I haven't quite gotten to the cramming and consolidating stage yet... but anyway, someone else will probably correct me here, but I believe passivization only occurs with transitive verbs, or intransitive verbs that assign a "object" role, verbs where action isn't actually initiated by the subject (these are also called unaccusitive. You can wikipedi it to make sure I'm not talking out of my ass, or to find out more). For example, I fell - I didn't actively fall, falling happened to me, so "I" am really, underlyingly, the "object". ("I" becomes the subject because English sentences require subjects, hence the dummy "It"). In French.. I'm not sure about the other romance languages, but this stems from Vulgar Latin so perhaps, in French unaccusative verbs are usually conjugated in compound tenses with etre (to be). Perhaps this will help with understanding it.
Passivization occurs far more frequently in English than in Italian or other romance languages, which use the "se" reflexive pronoun to avoid it.