Active and passive ‘voice’
This involves an aspect of the grammar (or properly. The syntax) a sentence or clause called agency – which itself is an aspect of the subject of the clause or sentence.
Typically an English sentence will be ‘cast’ or constructed in the active voice, e.g. ‘Richard Gent publishes the EnglishEdu website’. In such a sentence, the ‘syntactical space’ filled by the subject (S) is also the agent of the action told by the verb (V). In this typical ‘SVO’ sentence construction, the agency is clear, that is, who is doing what (and to whom). In this particular sentence, some kind of action is being transferred from the subject – that is, the agent, ‘Richard Gent’ – to an object (O), in this case ‘the EnglishEdu website’; because of this transferring of action to an object, the verb is called transitive.
Passive Voice
A different type of sentence construction is possible in English clauses and sentences. In this construction, the subject (S) position is occupied not by the agent but by what, in the ‘active voice’ sentence, would be the verb’s object, e.g. ‘The EnglishEdu web site is published by Richard Gent.’ Now, the grammatical subject position is filled by the noun phrase, ‘The EnglishEdu web site’ and the agent is moved from the typical subject position to become a part of a new prepositional phrase that follows the verb: ‘by Richard Gent’.
- This clause is now said to be in the passive voice.
Why is this an important element of style? It is because in a passive construction, the agent can be deleted but sense still remains, often creating what seems like a news headline: ‘EnglishEdu web site published’. This use of the passive allows for a clause to carry a different emphasis thus creating a potential ‘pragmatic force’ that leads to inferred meanings being created.
By ‘fronting’ the object in this way, the force of the sentence can be changed and the role of the agent can be diminished. Passive constructions are, as has been seen, popular in newspaper headlines where they create a usefully concise and authoritative style – and yet one that can work to avoid any blame being apportioned, e.g. ‘Bombs dropped in Helmand Province’. Here the agency of the action is removed.
