Fear and loathing of the English passive

TL;DR: The authors provide an informal but comprehensive syntactic description of passive clauses in English, and then exhibit numerous published examples of incompetent criticism in which critics reveal that they cannot tell passives from actives.

Abstract: Writing advisers have been condemning the English passive since the early 20th century. I provide an informal but comprehensive syntactic description of passive clauses in English, and then exhibit numerous published examples of incompetent criticism in which critics reveal that they cannot tell passives from actives. Some seem to confuse the grammatical concept with a rhetorical one involving inadequate attribution of agency or responsibility, but not all examples are thus explained. The specific stylistic charges leveled against the passive are entirely baseless. The evidence demonstrates an extraordinary level of grammatical ignorance among educated English language critics.

Summary

1 Introduction

• The references to passive constructions in the vast body of work on English grammar, usage, style, and writing are unremittingly negative.
• The authors massed, scientific, and bureaucratic society is so addicted to it that you must constantly alert yourself against its drowsy, impersonal pomp.

2 Describing English passive clauses

• The failure of English grammars to describe the passive adequately is partly due to a centuries-old tradition of talking about English grammar as if English were typologically similar to Latin, the international language of higher learning at the time when grammatical study of English began.
• The underlined verb in a passive clause like.
• She has been questioned by the detectives is exactly the same as the one underlined in the active clause.
• To construct an adequately general description of passive constructions the authors need to focus not on the verb but on larger units, specifically the verb phrase (VP) and the clause.

2.1 Passives with be

• There are at least two obvious ways of making a direct claim about the universal admiration for Anne’s scholarship within the department: the active transitive in (2a) and the passive counterpart in (2b).
• Thus in a sense two NPs exchange syntactic positions: the subject of (2a) appears as an internal complement within the VP in (2b), and vice versa.
• Not much is known by biologists about the coelacanth.
• The by-phrase3 in a passive is usually omissible, so some passives contain no counterpart of the NP that would have been the subject in the related active.
• The president’s authority has been much diminished by recent events in Washington.

2.2.1 Prepositional passives

• Thus, for example, (5a) has the passive counterpart (5b), where the (normally obligatory) complement of at is missing.
• Such prepositional passives may be long, like (5b), or short, like (5c).

2.2.2 Bare passive clauses

• CGEL calls such clauses bare passive clauses.
• That said, however, Korea is Korea, not the Philippines.
• One of its ads shows a washed-out manager, arms folded, sitting in a corner.
• One context in which bare passive clauses occur on their own is newspaper headlines: (7) a.
• France accused of running vast data surveillance scheme to keep tabs on population [The Independent, 5 July 2013] b. 28 injured in accidental detonation [Los Angeles Times, 5 July 2013] c. Chinese swimmers driven away by smelly green algae [BBC News website, 5 July 2013].

2.2.3 Embedded passives

• Passive clauses also occur embedded in active clauses.
• Various transitive verbs with causative, inchoative, or perception meanings take subjectless bare passive complements (that is, in effect, past-participial VPs).
• In (9a) the authors see an active complement clause (investigate the case) but the roughly synonymous (9b) has a passive counterpart .
• The government had the police investigate the case.
• Marie has been photographed by a journalist.

2.2.4 Adjectival passives

• The term ‘adjectival passive’ is often applied (perhaps not very felicitously) to active clauses with predicative adjective phrases in which the adjective derives from the past participle of a verb and has a passive-like meaning.
• There is frequently an ambiguity between be passives and adjectival ones.
• The intransitive verb get, which is not an auxiliary, has developed a special grammaticized use in marking an additional type of passive.
• The Nobel Prize in Physics got awarded to Peter Higgs in 2013.

2.2.6 Concealed passives

• Finally, there are also certain passive clauses, referred to in CGEL as concealed passives, that have a gerund-participle rather than a past participle as head: (16) a.
• The situation needs looking into by experts.
• In some dialects, need also takes a past-participial bare passive complement, so that This needs washed is grammatical.

2.3 Summary

• They also do not always obscure the role or responsibility of the doer.
• They may or may not have a subject (the passive clause in any monument defaced by vandals does not), and they may or may not have a by-phrase (The president has been assassinated does not).
• Often (as in (3)) there is no action whatsoever, rendering the strange phrase “receives the action” inappropriate.
• As the authors shall see in section 3, the usage advice literature, and the comments about usage and style by writers and critics in general, show an extraordinary level of ignorance of simple facts of this kind.

2.4.1 The state-affecting condition on prepositional passives

• The first one applies solely to prepositional passives.
• In prepositional passives of the locative type, the VP has to denote either a salient and significant property of the entity it is predicated of, very often determining a physical state change in that entity.
• It may surprise you to learn that this chair was once sat in by Sir Winston Churchill.
• The force of the constraint is illustrated by the infelicitous character of case (b), but not case (a), in (20). (20) a. [unacceptable because the subject is newer in the discourse than the by-phrase] . . [unacceptable because the subject is newer than passive complement NP] b. . . [acceptable because subject and passive complement NP are both discourse-old].

3 Critical incompetence

• Some writers seem to think that ‘passive’ means ‘contains an auxiliary verb’ or ‘contains a nominalization’; others are even more mysterious.
• He who robs his thoughts of action robs them of half their life, for life is action and readers like to think in terms of action.

4 Allegations about passives

• The kind of vague but highly prejudicial writing about style seen in the above quotation from Jensen et al. and elsewhere (e.g., from Strunk) has contributed to what is now an epidemic level of confusion among educated Americans.
• Yet those allegations are hardly ever seriously supported.
• It is surely not too much to ask that those who claim that the passive is bad should have some definition of the notion ‘passive’ in mind, and that their examples of passives should be passives according to that definition.
• But the authors could also reasonably ask that they should justify their claims about what is wrong with the examples.
• But in fact that condition is not met either.

4.1 Dull and static?

• The article in Wikipedia on President John F. Kennedy has a section headed ‘Assassination’ which begins thus: President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, at 12:30 pm Central Standard Time on November 22, 1963. . .
• One could hardly imagine a way of making a statement introducing that shocking event that would be more vivid.
• And with Kennedy as the topic of the entire article, having his name as the subject like this is obviously the best stylistic option.

4.2 Sneaky or evasive?

• Sherry Roberts’ astonishing metaphorical diatribe against the passive was quoted earlier.
• The committee will review all applications in early April.
• She unthinkingly repeats and embroiders the stock criticism of the short passive (that it leaves the agent unexpressed), but exemplifies with a long passive to which the stock criticism is inapplicable, failing to notice the inconsistency.
• C. Since metallic sodium reacts violently with water it is usually shipped in oil-filled canisters.
• In (45) and innumerable other such examples, specifying an agent is neither necessary nor even advisable.

4.3 Feeble rather than bold?

• Decrying passives as feeble, ineffective, and weak rather than bold, muscular, and strong seems to presuppose two things that need a defense.
• Indeed, filling in an agent as the arresting authority would actually have spoiled the exposition: in the first scene of the novel Reacher is taken into custody suddenly and without warning, and has no idea what is going on, who has ordered his arrest, or what the motive might be.
• The writing advisers seem to have no doubt in their minds that every sentence is supposed to come at you like a punch in the gut from Jack Reacher’s fist, on top of assuming unjustifiably that passive clauses can’t deliver a gut punch.

4.4 Avoided in the best writing?

• It matters very little whom you may decide to regard as an author exemplifying fine writing.
• It would certainly be ridiculous to suggest that the passive is absent from the work of admired authors in the early 20th century, when Strunk was teaching at Cornell and Orwell was a boy.
• White’s introduction to his revision of The Elements of Style (Strunk & White 2000).
• The authors were waiting outside the condemned cells, a row of sheds fronted with double bars, like small animal cages.
• 8 100% of the occurrences of these transitive verbs are in the passive voice.

5 Conclusions

• The topic of this paper is not so much a construction as a strange cultural trend emerging in the 20th century among language mavens, writing tutors, and usage advisers.
• The blind warning the blind about a nonexistent danger.
• Oversimplification and overkill by well-meaning advisers may have a lot to do with it.
• ‘Avoid the passive’ is typical of such virtually useless advice.
• Such teaching could hardly have worse results than the policies in place now, which have given us usage critics, writing tutors, and even style guide authors who have no idea what they are warning against when they hand out the standard warnings against the perennially hated passive voice, also known as One thing is certain.

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What contributions have the authors mentioned in the paper "Fear and loathing of the english passive" ?

This paper provide an informal but comprehensive syntactic description of passive clauses in English, and then exhibit numerous published examples of incompetent criticism in which critics reveal that they can not tell passives from actives. 

Q2. What is the meaning of passive verbs?

Various transitive verbs with causative, inchoative, or perception meanings take subjectless bare passive complements (that is, in effect, past-participial VPs). 

Q3. What is the reason why English grammars fail to describe the passive adequately?

The failure of English grammars to describe the passive adequately is partly due to a centuries-old tradition of talking about English grammar as if English were typologically similar to Latin, the international language of higher learning at the time when grammatical study of English began.