Passivization

Definition:

Passivization is the syntactic process of rearranging a sentence’s argument structure so that the patient (the entity affected by the action) becomes the grammatical subject, and the agent (the doer) is either demoted to an oblique phrase or omitted entirely. “The cake was eaten (by her)” is the passive of “She ate the cake.”

In-Depth Explanation

Passivization is one of the most common voice alternations across languages, but its form and function vary significantly.

English passive:

• Formed with auxiliary “be” + past participle: “The book was read by the student.”
• Agent optionally included with “by”: “The window was broken (by someone).”
• Primary function: to topicalize the patient, to omit an unknown/irrelevant agent, or to create a more formal register.

Japanese passive (受身形, ukemikei):

Japanese passive is formed by adding -(r)areru to the verb stem:

But Japanese passive is fundamentally different from English passive in a crucial way: it has a “suffering” or “adversative” passive (迷惑の受身, meiwaku no ukemi) that doesn’t exist in English:

• 雨に降られた。(I was rained on.) — There’s no corresponding active sentence *”Rain fell me.” The passive expresses that rain adversely affected the speaker.
• 子供に泣かれた。(The child cried on me.) — The child crying caused the speaker trouble.
• 隣の人にタバコを吸われた。(The person next to me smoked [and it bothered me].) — The smoking wasn’t done to the speaker, but the speaker was adversely affected.

This adversative passive allows intransitive verbs to be passivized — something impossible in English. “I was rained on” makes no sense as a true passive in English, but 雨に降られた is natural and common in Japanese.

For English speakers learning Japanese, the adversative passive is a major conceptual shift: passive isn’t just about rearranging agents and patients — it’s about expressing that something happened and affected someone negatively.

Related Terms

• Causativization
• Argument Structure
• Transitivity
• Participle
• Japanese Verb Conjugation

See Also

• Japanese Grammar
• Sakubo

Research

• Shibatani, M. (1985). Passives and related constructions: A prototype analysis. Language, 61(4), 821–848. — Cross-linguistic analysis of passive constructions including Japanese adversative passive.
• Tsujimura, N. (2014). An Introduction to Japanese Linguistics (3rd ed.). Wiley-Blackwell. — Clear coverage of Japanese direct, indirect, and adversative passive.