Passive Voice
Cheng Li
1
On the Use of Passive Voice
As an important grammatical construction, the English passive voice is widely used for
different speech purposes. While its usefulness is generally recognized, particularly in cases
where the patient is more important than the agent, also in some cases where it is desired to
emphasize the agent, the usage of the English passive varies with writing style and field.
Numerous studies have been conducted on varies factors influencing the form and usage of
passive voices, focusing on subjects, words order, writing styles and so on. In the present paper,
these factors related to passive voice are investigated. It is hypothesized that passive voice is not
merely the opposite form of active voice, and its usage in professional fields is not always the
same as it seems to be. The following five literature reviews attempt to demonstrate and support
the hypothesis.
Literature Review
In a research study article by Johnson-laird (1968), two specific questions were addressed
for guiding the study. First, would the subjects of all sentences tend to be represented as larger
than the objects? Second, would the subjects of passives be represented as larger than those of
actives? It is hypothesized that sentences in the passive voice emphasize the importance of the
things referred to by their grammatical subjects to a greater extent than sentences in the active
voice. The data was provided by 32 undergraduates (16 male and 16 female) in the Department
of Psychology, University College London, who are native speakers of English and ignorant of
the purpose of the experiment. Each subjects had to produce simple diagrams to represent two
sentences, one active and one passive, and the assumption was that the size of areas in these
diagrams could be taken as an index of importance. In order to vary the degree to which subjects
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would be likely to search explicitly for a difference in meaning between the two voices, two
groups were used. In Group EQ, the sentences specified an equivalent arrangement of colors,
such as “Red follows Blue,” “Blue is followed by Red”; in Group CO, they specified converse
arrangements, such as “Red follows Blue,” “Red is followed by Blue.” The results in this study
supported the basic hypothesis, which confirmed the two main predictions. The results also
indicated that a passive sentence does not necessarily refer to exactly the same thing as its
corresponding active. This has significance when looking at the notion of predominance, that it
should involve the factors which will have to be taken into account by any semantic theory, such
as socio-physical setting and linguistic context of an utterance. One limitation of this study is that
only two verbs were used in the experimental sentences, which have a relatively rear relation of
denoting the converse of one another. Another limitation is the imbalance of the references of
the subjects in the two groups: the subjects of the pairs in sentences in EQ referred to different
colors, while those in CO referred to the same color.
This article for me is a little difficult in spite that it has only 6 pages. The main reason of
its difficulty comes from my unfamiliarity to data analysis, which is not the focus of studies of
art students. It looks interesting for me to include some statistics in a research article that it
makes the form of the article less monotonous, and the results more convincing. After several
times’ reading, I could totally get the procedure of the research and the significance of its results;
consequently I could see some new discoveries in different viewpoints with most articles I have
read, especially those based on pure theoretical analyses. One interesting point I find comes
from an example, from which the author tries to show the difference between the passive
sentence and its corresponding active. Consider the sentence “Everyone knows some songs.”
This would be understood that the songs were not necessarily the same ones for everyone. By
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contrast, the sentence “Some songs are known by everyone” would be understood that it was the
same songs that were known. This effectively shows the effect of voice on the order of words.
A similar statistical analysis of passive voice is also found in a research article by
Klenbort and Anisfeld (1974). The authors firstly claimed that the main structural difference
between the passive voice and the active voice is in the position of the logical subject and logical
object. In an active sentence, the logical subject is also the grammatical subject, and the logical
object is the grammatical object. Whereas, in a passive sentence, the logical subject is the
grammatical object and the logical object is the grammatical subject. The difference between the
two voices was attributed to their markedness asymmetry, the passive being marked and the
active unmarked. The main focus was to investigate the functions suggested by the grammaticalobject position and to explore further the consequences of markedness. Since previous research
concentrated on the thematic function of the grammatical subject, the author attempted to correct
the imbalance by reporting a study which investigated the focal function of the grammatical
object. It is predicted that it is the passive rather than the active that is likely to suggest the focal
function for the grammatical object. The sample consisted of 48 subjects, 23 males and 25
females, in the age range of 21 to 35. They are all native English speakers, and had college
education of at least three years. The subjects were given active and passive sentences and for
each sentence had to choose between two alternative statements, where one alternative attributed
responsibility to the logical subject and the other to the logical object. It is hypothesized that for
the passive sentences, alternatives attributing responsibility to the logical subject will be chosen
over alternatives attributing responsibility to the logical object, whereas for the active sentences
there will not be a difference between the two sets of alternatives. The results are in accord with
the predictions and identify two characteristics that distinguish the logical subject in the passive.
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First, it is the focus of the assertion and as such its involvement in the sentential proposition is
more open to questioning and doubt than that of the logical object. Second, the logical subject
tends to suggest a general sense of responsibility for the event related in the sentence. It is also
concluded that the active offers a neutral structure for conveying information. The passive, on
the other hand, suggests special connotations in addition to the basic message.
This article is not easy for me to read, due to the background knowledge. I read of some
terminologies for the first time, such as logical subject, grammatical subject, focal function, and
sentential proposition. Although I could guess the general meaning of these words, they are so
abstract that I have to read the whole sentence by contexts once again to understand the exact
idea of the texts. I have a similar feeling about this article with the one written by Johnson-laird
(1968), which also involves some statistical analysis. I think for most students majoring in arts, a
scientific article analyzed from a more objective perspective would bring difficulties to us, since
most of the time, we are used to reflect on questions in a logical but subjective way. We usually
cite others’ research results as basis of our study, or rely on so-called common sense. The
importance of quantitative analysis should be paid attention to, in order to make our further study
more comprehensive and objective.
In a research article by Harris (1976), an experiment was made to study the influence of
both a syntactic cue (i.e. agent-deletion) and a semantic cue (i.e. non-reversibility) on the
evolving comprehension of passive sentences by young children. The sample consisted of 58
children, 3-7 years old. Reversible and non-reversible active and passive sentences, half of which
were truncated and half not, were presented to these children. Comprehension of each sentence
was tested by the simultaneous presentation of picture pairs, one of which showed the actor and
object in the same roles and the other in the opposite roles to that described by the sentence. It
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was predicted that three distinct patterns of performance would emerge from the three age groups
to be studied. The youngest children were expected to find great difficulty in dealing with
passive sentences as compared with actives. It was further predicted that they would have equal
difficulty with all the passive sentences since they would not be able to use either the semantic or
syntactic cues available in non-reversible and agent deleted passives. For children at the next
stage of development it was predicted that overall performance on passives would still be inferior
to that on actives but that there would be differences in the pass rates for the different types of
passives. The reversible passives would elicit more failures than non-reversible and agent-stated
more failures than agent-deleted. Following from this it was predicted that passives where
neither syntactic nor semantic cues were present, namely those which were both full and
reversible, would cause the greatest number of failures. No corresponding predictions were made
about performance on active sentences since it was assumed that subjects would not need cues to
interpret them. For the oldest children it was predicted that there would be no difference in
performance on active and passive sentences since comprehension of the latter would be fully
developed. Thus there would be no difference in this group between performance on reversible
and nonreversible and agent-stated and agent-deleted passives. The results suggested that
children who have attained a mental age of six years are able to comprehend passive sentences
which contain neither cues of non-reversibility nor agent-deletion to aid interpretation. Children
below a mental age of six years experience greater difficulty with passive sentences, in contrast
to children in the older group who comprehended all types of sentence with equal ease. The most
important finding is the confirmation of the prediction that agent-deletion would also facilitate
passive sentence comprehension.
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While the differences between active and passive voices have been discussed many times
by using statistical analysis, an analysis of their practical usage in a specific field is made. In the
research article by Tarone et al. (1998), the authors examined the occurrence of passive and
active verb forms in journal papers in one field, astrophysics, in order to determine whether
writers in this field do prefer the passive over the active. A count of active and passive verb
forms in two professional journal papers in astrophysics showed that within this rhetorical
structure the active voice was used much more frequently than the passive, and more importantly,
that the active first person plural we verb form seems to be regularly used at strategic points
relating to the rhetorical structure of these papers. The authors proposed four rhetorical functions
of the passive as opposed to we plus an active verb: (1) we indicates the author’s procedural
choice, while the passive indicates an established or standard procedure; (2) we is used to
describe the author’s own work and the passive to describe the work of others, unless that work
is not mentioned in contrast to the author’s in which case the active is used; (3) the passive is
used to describe the author’s proposed studies; and (4) the use of the active or the passive is
determined by focus due to the length of an element or the need for emphasis. An investigation
into the functions performed by the active and the passive verbs within the rhetorical structure of
these two papers allowed the authors to make the following generalizations: Generalization I:
Writers of astrophysics journal papers tend to use the first person plural active WE form to
indicate points in the logical development of the argument where they have made a unique
procedural choice; the passive seems to be used when the authors are simply following
established or standard procedure, as in using accepted equations or describing what logically
follows from their earlier procedural choice. Generalization IIA: When these authors contrast
their own research with other contemporary research they use the first person plural active for
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their own work, and the passive for the work being contrasted. Generalization IIB: When these
authors cite other contemporary work which is not in contrast to their own, they generally use the
active form of the verb. Generalization III: When these authors refer to their own proposed future
work, they use the passive. Generalization IV: The use of active as opposed to passive forms of
the verb seems to be conditioned by discoursal functions of focus when the author chooses to
postpose or to front certain sentence elements for emphasis-or by the excessive length of those
elements. It was suggested that this rhetorical structure is probably not limited to the field of
astrophysics, but may be common in other fields as well. One problem of this research is that the
authors were not sure whether the four generalizations ever conflict with one another. They
suspected that some of the apparent exceptions to their generalizations but also perhaps may be
due to such a conflict. More research is needed to investigate this problem. Besides, further
investigation is needed to determine whether professional journal papers in other theoretical
fields where similar sorts of logical argumentation guide the development of the paper use active
and passive verbs in similar ways. One area to investigate would be journal papers in other areas
of physics. In fields such as philosophy or even some areas of linguistics, where papers do not
report experimental studies but rather are structured in terms of logical argument, we might see
similar uses of the active and passive voice as signposts in the development of the argument.
This article really interests me a lot since it brings me an innovative perspective different
with previous ones, since it has long been accepted that one of the most salient grammatical
features of the register of English for Science and Technology is its relatively frequent use of the
passive form of the verb. Another interesting point is a table of logical structures of a theoretical
paper in astrophysics; the creative way of analyzing shows me a systematical and logical method
to process thinking.
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Except for the usage of passive voice in the specific field astrophysics, social factors
related to passive voice are investigated. In a research article by Bohner (2001), three questions
were addressed. First, if the preference for using the passive voice and other obscuring language
in writing about rape could be found in those who do not write professionally (journalists and
scientists)? Then, will the variations in the rape scenario affect the usage of such obscuring
language features? Another question is whether the usage of obscuring language is related to
direct language features? The focus of the study is to investigate the influence of situational
features on the use of the active vs. passive voice and other distancing text features in writing
about a rape. Another focus of this study is the relationship between these linguistic features and
the direct attributions of responsibility as well as the general acceptance of rape myths. Four
hypotheses were tested: When writing about an observed rape, individuals use passive voice
more frequently to describe the perpetrator’s actions comparing to other actions contained in the
rape scene; If the rape scene contains lots of details that are easily interpretable than if the rape
scene contains few such details, the difference stated above is more pronounced; Individual’s
usage of the passive voice in describing the perpetrator’s actions is positively correlated with
their general rape myth acceptance; Active vs. passive use can serve as an indicator of attribution
of responsibility. A sample of sixty-seven students at a German university (29 female; 38 male;
median age = 23 years) were used for the study on media effects, and they were assigned to
watch a silent video segment depicting a rape whose circumstances, could or could not be easily
interpreted in terms of rape myths. Then they were asked to write down what they had seen,
judge the responsibility of assailant and victim, and complete a rape-myth acceptance scale. The
results of this study indicate that the use of the passive voice and other distancing strategies are
employed not only by professional journalists and scientists, but also in the writing of non-
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professional people. Besides, the findings support the idea that use of the passive voice and other
distancing text features reflect anti-victim attitudes and judgments. Overall, the active voice was
more prevalent than the passive voice in all conditions, but this simply reflects the generally
higher prevalence of the active in the German language. Since the sample was from German
students, a limitation to this study is the difference in linguistic features between English and
German, although there is a formal equivalence in them with respect to the active and passive
voice, the actual prevalence of the passive voice in German is relatively low with that in English.
This article attracts me a lot since it confirms to what I have leant in grammar class:
meaning, and use of a grammar point. Here I think of a similar reason why we use the passive
voice, and this one can be even more socially useful, or politically useful. I remember the
sentences I used from two different videos in a practice teaching class of passive voice, “He’s
right, mistakes WERE MADE. And I’m frankly not happy about them. ” And “I would like now
to apologize to all the people for all the suffering that has been caused and the problems that
have arisen from this.” Here, the active sentence shows the subject taking the responsibility,
whereas, in the passive sentence, the subject avoids the responsibility.
It can be assumed from these five literature reviews that passive voice has its facets when
it comes into usage in various contexts. More research is needed into the uses of the active and
passive forms of the verb in research papers of all kinds. It should not simply be assumed that the
passive voice is generally used more frequently in all fields of science or technology.
Furthermore, as an English learner and a potential teacher, it is important to understand that the
issue of learners’ prior knowledge is significant. In this case, making a conceptual link between
the active and passive voice is an effective grammatical construction. Also, the communicative
functioning of the passive voice can help ESL teachers to arrive at their own well-formed
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decisions about how to teach the passive, with the emphasis on the semantics and pragmatics,
rather than on the syntax of the form. From my point of view, the semantics and pragmatics are
what teaching grammars are primarily about. With this idea in my mind, I have experienced a
practice teaching of passive voice in the course of English 487 World English. My focus of
teaching passive voice was on its usage. I referred to the grammar book, and combined the
teaching points in it with those in a video clip. To test students’ understanding of the usage of
passive voice, I designed an activity for them to make up sentences which have the same reasons
to use passive with the sentences I have showed to them. Besides, I chose some pictures and
other video clips from politics and entertainment to make my lesson look more interesting and
various in forms. I also made up some sentences by myself, in which some of my students in this
class were mentioned. In this way, their interest would be aroused and it would help them pay
more attention to what they were learning, and also help them to consolidate the new knowledge.
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References
Bohner, G. (2001). Writing about rape: Use of the passive voice and other distancing text
features as an expression of perceived responsibility of the victim. British Journal of
Social Psychology, 40, 515–529.
Harris, M. (1976). The influence of reversibility and truncation on the interpretation of the
passive voice by young children. Br. J. Psychology, 67(3), 419-427.
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1968). Shorter articles and notes the interpretation of the passive voice.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 20(1), 69-73.
Klenbort, I., & Anisfeld, M. (1974). Markedness and perspective in the interpretation of the
active and passive voice. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 26(2), 189-195.
Tarone, E., Dwyer, S., Gillette, S., & Icke, V. (1998). On the use of the passive and active voice
in astrophysics journal papers: with extensions to other languages and other fields.
English for Specific Purposes, 17(1), 113-132.