Passive Voice

Definition:

The passive voice is a grammatical construction in which the grammatical subject of a sentence is the recipient of the action expressed by the verb, rather than the agent performing it. In the English sentence “The book was written by the author,” the book (the thing acted upon) occupies the subject position, while the agent (the author) is demoted to an optional prepositional phrase or omitted entirely. Passive voice contrasts with active voice, where the agent appears as the grammatical subject (“The author wrote the book”).

In-Depth Explanation

Passive voice is formed differently across languages, but the underlying semantic shift — from agent-fronted to patient-fronted sentences — is near-universal. In English, the passive is formed with an auxiliary verb (be, occasionally get) plus the past participle: “The letter was sent,” “The window got broken.” The agent may be expressed in a by-phrase (“was sent by Maria”) or dropped entirely when irrelevant, unknown, or deliberately obscured (“Mistakes were made”).

Why use the passive? Languages deploy passive constructions for communicative purposes, not grammatical decoration. The primary functions are:

Prominence shift: When the action’s recipient is more newsworthy or already topical than the agent. Scientific writing uses passive heavily (“Samples were analyzed at 40°C”) to foreground the process rather than the researcher.
Agent omission: When the agent is unknown (“The artifact was stolen in 1983”), irrelevant (“Spanish is spoken in 20+ countries”), or deliberately unnamed (political and bureaucratic language).
Discourse cohesion: Placing known information first (“The defendant was arrested yesterday. He was then charged…”). Keeping the same entity as subject across sentences creates smoother reading.

Passivization across typologies: Not all languages form passives the same way. German uses werden + past participle for the Vorgangspassiv (process: “Das Buch wird gelesen”) and sein + past participle for the Zustandspassiv (resultant state: “Das Buch ist gelesen”). Japanese has a “direct” passive (受け身, ukemi) that mirrors English structures, and an “indirect” or “adversative passive” (meiwaku jidō-ukemi, 迷惑受身) with no English equivalent — expressing that the subject was negatively affected by another’s action (“I was rained on,” “My wallet was stolen from me”). Mandarin Chinese has a bèi (被) passive for adversative/negative contexts and largely avoids the construction in neutral statements.

The “passive is weak” myth: Writing teachers sometimes advise writers to avoid the passive, calling it “weak” or “evasive.” This advice is routinely misapplied. The passive is not weak — it is a pragmatically committed choice that serves specific discourse functions. The problem arises only when passive is used to hide agency where clarity demands naming one (“The committee approved the budget” vs. “The budget was approved” — if the committee matters, name them). Scientific writing and legal language use passive appropriately and precisely.

History

The formal analysis of passive constructions dates at least to traditional grammar, which distinguished “passive” and “active” voice in Greek and Latin. In generative grammar, Noam Chomsky’s early Syntactic Structures (1957) analyzed passivization as a grammatical transformation — a rule turning an underlying active sentence into its passive counterpart. This “transformation rule” approach was one of the central examples in early transformational-generative grammar.

Later, in Government and Binding theory and Minimalism, passivization was reanalyzed in terms of movement (the object moves to subject position) combined with absorption of the external argument and accusative Case. Cross-linguistic research in typology through the 1970s–90s documented the full range of passive types, including the adversative passives of Japanese and other East Asian languages that don’t fit neatly into English-based definitions.

Common Misconceptions

“Passive voice is always bad.” Style guides that warn against passive are targeting unnecessary or evasive use — not the construction itself. The passive is grammatically correct and often the best choice.
“You can always identify passive by looking for ‘was’ or ‘-ed’.” Not quite. “She was tired” is a stative predicate (linking verb + adjective), not a passive. “The door was painted” is ambiguous — it can be passive (someone painted it recently) or a stative (it has the property of being painted). Context distinguishes them.
“All languages have a passive.” Most do, but not all. Some languages handle agent-demotion through other means, such as impersonal constructions, antipassives, or topic-fronting devices.
“Passive = formal.” Passive is common in academic writing, but “The window got smashed” is highly colloquial. The get-passive in English is often informal and implies adversity.

Criticisms

The prescriptive warning against passive voice — codified in handbooks like Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style — has been widely criticized by linguists and writing researchers. Geoffrey Pullum has documented cases where Strunk and White themselves used passive while condemning it, and noted that they misidentify many examples of “passive” in their own text. The advice, though useful when narrowly targeting evasive or verbose writing, teaches many students to fear a grammatical construction they don’t fully understand — and sometimes leads to uncomfortable rewriting of naturally patient-fronted sentences.

Social Media Sentiment

Grammar communities on Reddit (r/grammar, r/linguistics) frequently see posts from writers confused about passive voice after receiving workshop feedback. The consensus is that “avoid passive” is an oversimplification taken too seriously. On r/languagelearning and r/LearnJapanese, the adversative/indirect passive in Japanese generates constant discussion — learners find it one of the most conceptually difficult structures to internalize because English has no equivalent frame for “I was rained on” or “My friend died on me.”

Practical Application

For English writers: Learn to recognize passive constructions and ask one question: does omitting or burying the agent serve a legitimate communicative purpose? If yes, use passive freely. If you’re hiding who did something when readers need to know, rewrite in active.

For learners of European languages: Passive formation varies — work through your target language’s auxiliary + participle system explicitly. German’s two-passive distinction (process vs. state) trips up many learners. French se faire + infinitive is a distinct passive-like construction worth learning separately.

For Japanese learners: The adversative passive (迷惑受身) must be studied as a distinct construction, not mapped onto English passive. Practice reading and writing sentences where the subject experiences an event done by someone else, often with negative nuance: 雨に降られた (I was rained on), 財布を盗まれた (I had my wallet stolen). This structure appears frequently in natural Japanese and is rarely taught early enough in most courses.

Related Terms

Research

Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic Structures. Mouton. [Introduced passive as a formal grammatical transformation in generative grammar]
Shibatani, M. (1985). Passives and related constructions. Language, 61(4), 821–848. [Comprehensive cross-linguistic typology of passive constructions]
Pullum, G. K. (2010). The land of the free and The Elements of Style. English Today, 26(2), 34–44. [Documents misapplication of “avoid passive” advice and Strunk/White’s own passive use]
Jacobsen, W. M. (1992). The Transitive Structure of Events in Japanese. Kurosio. [Covers Japanese passive construction types including adversative passive]