Passive voice – what it is!

WELL, I’m sorry but two weeks of no grammar is as much as you can be allowed, and this week it’s back to the grindstone! Not only that, we’re back on to verbs again, and a completely new concept, and one that is dealt with differently in English than in Spanish. It couldn’t be worse really, so if you would rather turn the page and read about the latest charity event or how to control your weight, I suggest you do so now.

So, now we’ve got rid of the faint-hearted, the rest of us can knuckle down. We are going to start looking at the ‘passive voice’. The passive what? I hear you ask. You may not be aware that as well as verb ‘tenses’, there are also things called ‘voices’ and ‘moods’ of verbs.

We’ll leave the moods until later (but won’t forget about them!) and talk about ‘voices’. There are two voices in language terms – the ‘active’ voice and the ‘passive’ voice.

Most of the things we learn in grammar initially belong to the active voice. An example of a sentence in the active voice is one that is made up of the SUBJECT plus VERB plus OBJECT, for example ‘The boy (subject) reads (verb) the book (object)’ or in Spanish ‘El niño lee el libro’.

My most humble apologies if I have used this example before to illustrate other things. I suffer for the inability to think of more than one very boring example when explaining grammar.

The same thing happens to me when I teach the ‘going to’ future. I always say “Tomorrow I’m going to play tennis” despite the fact that I haven’t played tennis since I was a schoolgirl and even then I hated it with a vengeance.

So anyway, we have now seen what an active sentence looks like, and the next thing I am going to do is turn the English active sentence ‘the boy reads the book’ into a passive one, like this: ‘The book is read by the boy’. You will see that I have taken the object of the sentence (i.e. the word that receives the action of the verb, in this case ‘book’) and placed it in the position of the subject (i.e. in front of the verb). The two sentences mean exactly the same thing, but if I start off by saying ‘the book’ I then have to change ‘reads’ to ‘is read’ Notice the same spelling but different pronunciation of ‘read’ in English – deeply confusing for non-native English speakers. Perhaps I should go mad and change the example to ‘buy’. ‘The boy buys the book’. ‘The book IS BOUGHT by the boy’.

Another important question here is: Why do we do this? Well, in the case of this particular boy and his book, there is no answer to the question, but suppose we change our example to ‘Mr. O’Reilly built the school in 1962’. It is unlikely that 50 years later anyone would have any interest in poor old Mr. O’Reilly, but they might be interested in the age of the school. Therefore we would say ‘The school WAS BUILT in 1962’. We could add ‘by Mr. O’Reilly’

if we really wanted to, but usually we wouldn’t.

So, hopefully you can now see that we use the ‘passive voice’ when we are more interested in the ‘object’ of the sentence than the ‘subject’ or if there were some reason why we are unable, or do not wish to name the subject.

Here’s another example: ‘I was told to fill in this form’. The active sentence would be ‘Mr. X told me to fill in the form’ but perhaps we don’t remember who Mr. X was, or we don’t know the person’s name, or even (horror of horrors) we’re telling a porky which we can only sustain by omitting the information about who told us. You see, it might seem boring, but actually the ‘passive voice’ can be very interesting.There is rather a lot more to say on the subject, which will now have to be left (that’s passive too – ‘I will have to leave it’) till next week.