Voice (Grammar) — a grammatical category that describes the relationship between the verb, the subject, and the object — primarily active voice (subject acts) and passive voice (subject is acted upon).
Definition
A grammatical category that describes the relationship between the verb, the subject, and the object — primarily active voice (subject acts) and passive voice (subject is acted upon).
In Depth
A grammatical category that describes the relationship between the verb, the subject, and the object — primarily active voice (subject acts) and passive voice (subject is acted upon).
In-Depth Explanation
Voice (grammar) is a grammatical category that expresses the relationship between the participants in an event (the arguments) and their grammatical functions — specifically whether the subject is the agent (performs the action), the patient (undergoes the action), or another role. The most familiar voice distinction in European languages is active vs. passive; Japanese has a richer voice system including passive, causative, and causative-passive forms, each with distinctive morphological marking and pragmatic function.
Core voice categories:
| Voice | Description | Subject role | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Active | Default; agent is grammatical subject | Agent | The cat ate the fish |
| Passive | Patient is promoted to subject; agent demoted | Patient | The fish was eaten (by the cat) |
| Antipassive | Agent is subject; patient demoted | Agent | (Ergative languages; not in Japanese) |
| Causative | Subject causes another to do/be | Causer | She made him eat the vegetables |
| Middle | Subject affected by action; agent = patient | Agent/Patient (same) | The door opened |
Japanese passive (受身, ukemi):
Japanese has two functionally distinct passive constructions:
- Direct passive (直接受身, chokusetsu ukemi): Standard active-to-passive conversion — the patient becomes subject
先生が学生を叱った → 学生が先生に叱られた
Teacher scolded student → Student was scolded by teacher
- Adversative / Indirect passive (間接受身, kansetsu ukemi): A construction absent in English — the subject is adversely affected by an action, even when not a direct participant. The subject “suffers” the consequences:
彼は雨に降られた → He was rained on (= the rain fell and it affected him negatively)
彼女は夫に死なれた → She suffered the death of her husband (he died on her)
The adversative passive is uniquely Japanese and a significant learning challenge — it has no English structural equivalent. It encodes the pragmatic meaning of the subject’s unwanted experience of the event marked by the verb.
Japanese causative (使役, shieki):
Japanese causative is formed by adding せる / させる to the verb stem:
- 行く (iku, “go”) → 行かせる (ikaseru, “make/let go”)
- 食べる (taberu, “eat”) → 食べさせる (tabesaseru, “make/let eat”)
Japanese causative can encode both compulsive causation (X forces Y to do) and permissive causation (X lets Y do) — the interpretation depends on context and syntax. This is different from English, which lexically distinguishes “make” (compulsion) and “let” (permission).
Causative-passive (使役受動, shieki-ukemi):
A commonly used but structurally complex form: causative + passive — the subject is made/forced to do something by another:
- 上司に残業させられた → I was made to work overtime by my boss
- する → させる (causative) → させられる (causative-passive)
The causative-passive reliably encodes adversative causation — being forced to do something undesirable — and is extremely frequent in natural Japanese speech.
History
Voice as a grammatical category has been analysed since classical Greek grammar (ἐνεργητική/παθητική active/passive). Syntactic analyses of passive in transformational grammar (Chomsky 1957 onwards) drove formal voice research. Japanese passive and causative morphology have been extensively studied: Shibatani (1973) provided early transformational analysis; the adversative passive was documented in typological and Japanese-specific research from the 1970s. Keenan’s (1985) cross-linguistic passive typology documented the range of passive semantics including the adversative type.
Common Misconceptions
- “Japanese passive is just like English passive.” The adversative passive has no English structural equivalent — English has no grammaticalised construction for “the subject was negatively affected by this event.” L1 English speakers must learn this as a genuinely new construction, not a mapped equivalent.
- “Causative always means compulsion.” Japanese causative can encode permission or facilitation in addition to compulsion. Context, verb semantics, and the animacy of the causee determine interpretation. The causative-passive form more reliably signals compulsive/adversative causation.
- “Voice is just about active/passive.” Voice covers a range of argument-structure alternations beyond active/passive — causation, anticausation, reflexive, middle, and reciprocal constructions all involve voice-related argument-role shifts.
Social Media Sentiment
Japanese passive and causative are among the most discussed advanced grammar topics in learner communities — after mastering basic verb conjugation, the passive, causative, and causative-passive constructions are a significant step up in grammatical complexity. “How does Japanese passive work?” and “when do you use causative vs. causative-passive?” are frequent HiNative and r/LearnJapanese questions. The adversative passive — so different from English — routinely appears in “most confusing Japanese grammar” lists.
Last updated: 2026-04
Practical Application
- Adversative passive context: Collect examples of the adversative passive in manga, novels, or drama scripts — identify the subject’s negative experience (their perspective of suffering from the event) and practise generating examples with different agent/event combinations.
- Causative vs. causative-passive: For production, the default rule: use causative (させる) when you’re the causer; use causative-passive (させられる) when you’re the one being made to do something. Apply this to workplace, classroom, and family contexts — the causative-passive is extremely frequent in accounts of obligations and social pressure.
- Sentence transformation practice: Transforming active sentences through the passive, then through the causative-passive, builds morphological fluency with the form-sequence する → させる → させられる.
Related Terms
See Also
Sources
- Shibatani, M. (1973). Semantics of Japanese causativization. Foundations of Language, 9(3), 327–373. Foundational analysis of Japanese causative semantics and morphology; established the compulsive/permissive distinction and the formal structure of the causative construction.
- Keenan, E. L. (1985). Passive in the world’s languages. In T. Shopen (Ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description, vol. 1 (pp. 243–281). Cambridge University Press. Cross-linguistic typological analysis of passive constructions including the adversative passive and its distribution across language families.
- Makino, S., & Tsutsui, M. (1995). A Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar. Japan Times. Systematic coverage of Japanese passive, causative, and causative-passive constructions with example sentences; essential practical reference for L2 learners.