Cambridge Grammar of English Hardback with cd-rom a comprehensive Guide

Û

also 142 Nominalisation in Grammar and academic English and 175

Formation of nouns (nominalisation)

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539 Glossary for any unfamiliar terms

Word order and focus | 791

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The passive

Introduction

476

Verb complementation and passive voice

477

The be-passive: formation

478

The get-passive: formation

479

Pseudo-passives with have: formation

480

Agent phrases

481

Passives without an agent phrase

482

General 482a

Detached/impersonal styles 482b

Anticipatory it 482c

Existential there 482d

Panel: Functions of the get-passive

483

Functions of pseudo-passives with have

484

Get- and have-pseudo-passives

485

Verbs usually only found in the passive

486

Deserve, need, require, want with a passive meaning

487

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| 793

The passive

INTRODUCTION

476

Choice of voice (active or passive) is one of several ways of organising the content

of clauses.

The active voice is the most frequent form, typically chosen to state something

about the agent of an action (i.e. who does what). The agent is expressed as the

grammatical subject and normally initiates the action:

Ken took that photograph.

Ken

is here the grammatical subject and also the agent of the action. Ken is also

the starting point or theme of the message (

Û

472

). Took that photograph is the

rheme; it describes the action, what the speaker wants to say about Ken. 

If a passive voice is chosen, the starting point of the message is the person or

thing that is the affected participant of the action:

Those houses were built by John Walton.

Here those houses are the starting point or theme of the message. Those houses

becomes the grammatical subject of the clause. What is said about the houses here

includes information about the agent (the person who built them, John Walton).

In this case the agent is expressed in the prepositional phrase by John Walton.

Finite forms

Various forms of the passive exist (

Û

478–480 below

). The most typical is the

passive with be:

I 

was approached and asked to go along.

No crime 

has been committed.

We 

were rung up by one of those consumer survey companies.

New features 

are being added to the machines all the time.

Other forms share some characteristics with passive forms and are called pseudo-

passive forms. They are based on get and have and are more common in spoken

language. They are similar to true passives with be in that the grammatical subject

is typically the recipient, rather than the agent, of the action. However, they differ

from true passives in the functions they perform and the contexts in which they

are used, especially with regard to the degree of involvement of the recipient in

initiating the action, as can be seen in the table below (

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also 479 and 480

):

The village 

is getting more and more built up.

She 

had her car stolen.

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In spoken language, the get-passive is especially common:

He 

got thrown out of a restaurant in town.

I wrote a letter to a newspaper and it 

got published.