What is passive voice?
Passive voice is a syntactic construction that reverses the agent and patient of a verb. In active voice, the subject of the sentence is also the agent of a verb, and the patient is the direct object of the predicate. The passive voice, on the other hand, makes the subject of the sentence the patient. Take this sentence for example:
In the first example, the sentence is active and says both the agent of the verb, the boy, and the patient, the water balloon. The subject changes to the patient in the second sentence because it is a passive construction. Additionally, the inclusion of the by phrase is optional in passive syntax. The passive sentence example above could simply read, "The water balloon was thrown." Omission of the by phrase allows for more pragmatic ambiguity.
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Strunk and White (1935) suggest that a writer should use the active voice primarily. They explain, “the active voice is usually more direct and vigorous than the passive” (p. 28). George Orwell (1946) reiterates this rule that a writer must “never use the passive where you can use the active” in his article, “Politics and the English Language.” He asserts that the passive voice is more vague and results in weak verbs, and therefore should be avoided. While Strunk and White and Orwell subscribe to prescriptive rules, each also concedes the importance of passive voice in certain contexts.
In order to change a sentence from active to passive, one must perform a grammar transformation, in a process called passivization. (Flemming, 1988). Largely, this transformation can only occur with transitive verbs, or verbs that have a direct object. Passivization inverts the subject (agent) with the direct object (patient) for transitive verbs. Because intransitive verbs do not have a direct object, they cannot be transformed. In the sentence, “She arrived,” she is the subject, arrived is an intransitive verb, and there can be no direct object. A speaker can also use passive voice to remove an agent in the sentence in a transformation called agent deletion (p. 8). In some cases, the agent of the verb can be removed completely in passive voice. For instance, “the water balloon was thrown” omits who threw the ball; this transformation is called agent deletion (Fleming, 1988, p. 30). By examining examples of agent deletion, one can see how this transformation plays a key role in concealing the actor of a verb or sentence. Take the example "James broke the vase." If one used passivization and agent deletion transformations, the sentence would become "The vase was broken (by James)." In this example, the active voice shows who broke the vase. But the passive version shows the vase broken outside of the context of who broke it, adding ambiguity.
It is important to analyze when each of these occurs in a politician's sentence construction because it can change their intended meaning. In one instance, a speaker can include an agent with a by + agent construction and emphasize the agent or action, depending on their purpose. Cognitive psychologist and linguist George Lakoff describes this as "framing" in our interview. He claims, "one of the uses is to shift from the focus of one party to another. So if you want to change the person you are talking about or the topic you’re talking about, you can use the passive voice" (2019). The position of an agent and patient in a sentence can greatly influence the frame that the speaker wants to emphasize. Through various political examples, passivization and agent deletion will be examined as grammar transformations and rhetorical choices.
So why do politicians, lawyers, journalists, and authors use passive voice? In large part, passive voice benefits the speaker because it allows them to manipulate semantic meaning to align with a pragmatic function. Michael Flemming (1988) argues that “ideology influences transformations… and that these influences must be taken into consideration when analyzing discourse” (p. 1). These transformations from the active to passive voice are of particular importance in political discourse because they allow speakers to change the message according to their platform or position. Politicians use these passive constructions as a rhetorical device for several purposes: clarity and end-focus, blame aversion, and unknown agent. Through an analysis of the ways in which speakers use passive voice, the speaker’s intentions can be revealed.
Passive Voice in Other LanguagesThis phenomenon of using passive voice is not unique to English. Passive constructions that allow for ambiguity of an agent have been recorded in Cantonese, Mandarin, Spanish, Indonesian, Japanese, Portuguese, French, and others. This research primarily focuses on the way in which US politicians, law makers, and journalists use passive sentence construction in English.
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Krista Balster-Gee
California Polytechnic State University
San Luis Obispo
Spring 2019
California Polytechnic State University
San Luis Obispo
Spring 2019
Unless otherwise cited, all images are courtesy Pixabay