Intermediate - Grammar: Passive voice

Useful lesson indeed, even though I'm not a big fan of passive voice... they use it a lot in Finnish, and I think the biggest offenders are politicians and lawyers. Using passive voice avoids personal responsibility. Like instead of telling us who it was that raised taxes... they just say taxes were raised. Or instead of telling who murdered the victim, they just say the victim was murdered. I'd rather hear the subject in almost all cases.

Thanks, a useful lesson. Although agreeing that the passive voice is sometimes used - irritatingly - as a means of evasion of responsibility, it is useful for succinctly conveying a situation where the there is genuine uncertainty of who is responsible for something or where the cause is obvious (perhaps mentioned or implied in a preceding sentence) and the result is the more important. Eg one might say it rained heavily, or the waves were high so I was drenched. Of course, 'and it soaked me' could also be said. It could also be used humorously eg I was on a boat, the sea became rough and, unfortunately, my feet got drenched. Even more unfortunately, it wasn't the high waves that drenched them but the vomit of my fellow passengers... Apologies for the unpleasant image!

This podcast raises a great many interesting questions. I’ll begin with the use of the imperative. I’m surprised that Ehab and Mohamed deemed it necessary to point out that imperatives cannot be passivized. A passive imperative would be an absurdity since an imperative is always addressed to an agent (i.e. the doer of an action) or a group of agents. Thus, for instance, it would be perfectly natural to say “He was shot (or he got shot) by a sniper (ﻗﻨﺎﺺ)”, but it would be absurd to say “Get shot by a sniper!” Since the victim cannot choose his murderer, the imperative would have to be addressed to the sniper.

In European languages the passive voice is often used to depersonalise statements, and the editors of academic journals often mention the use of the passive voice in guidelines for authors. If a chemist were to submit a research paper to the editors of an academic journal he would have to write: “Sulphuric acid was made by heating alum”, not “I made sulphuric acid by heating alum.” Incidentally, the Arabic equivalent of “sulphuric acid is haamid (ﺤﻤﺾ) al-kibritik (ﺍﻠﻜﺒﺮﻴﺘﻴﻚ), and the plural of haamid (ﺤﻤﺾ) is hawaamid (ﺤﻮﺍﻤﺾ).

The passive voice is less common in Arabic than in English. One of the reasons for this is that many Form VII verbs have a passive meaning. Examples:

yanqalib (ﻴﻨﻗﻠﺐ): it is overturned
yankasir (ﻴﻨﻜﺴﺮ): it is broken

When an Arabic verb is used in the passive voice, the agent is rarely mentioned. Thus, for instance, an Arab will have to choose between “The lesson was written (+ ADVERB (e.g. yesterday))” or “Ehab wrote the lesson (+ ADVERB (e.g. yesterday))”. Sentence patterns like “The lesson was written by Ehab.” are typically English and tend to be rare in Arabic.

The rarity of the agentive passive (a passive verb followed by an agentive by-phrase) has important implications since the alternation of active and passive constructions plays an important role in text construction. Consider the following example:

A man was attacked by a tiger (ﻨﻤﺮ). In this case the man is foregrounded, while the tiger remains in the background. If we use an active construction the tiger leaps into the foreground (A tiger attacked a man). Similar foregrounding techniques can be observed in films where the camera moves rapidly from one person to another and an actor’s face fills almost the entire screen.

In an English text the choice of the passive voice will predetermine the content of the sequence that follows the passivized sentence. If we opt for a passive construction like “Yesterday a man was attacked by a tiger”, the word “tiger” is in end position and can be used like a springboard. We can now add several sentences that provide information about the animal. We could say: “According to the police, the animal escaped from a nearby zoo. It is particularly dangerous since, owing to a strike, it has not been fed for several days. After attacking the man it ran off into some dense woodland on the outskirts of the city. Local people are still trying to identify its whereabouts.”

Now let’s replace the passive construction by an active one: “Yesterday a tiger attacked a man.” In the present instance the word “man” is in end position, and our text would be rather disjointed if we were to add a sequence about the tiger (According to the police, the animal escaped (…)). If we want to produce a well-crafted and coherent text we will have to forget about the tiger and furnish some additional information about the victim. We could add a relative clause (a man who was sitting on a bench in a public park) to round off the introductory sentence and make it sound more natural. Then we could add two or three sentences such as the following: “The man, whose identity is unknown, was badly mauled and is currently being treated in the intensive care unit of a local hospital. A surgeon interviewed by our correspondent said his chances of survival were slim.”

The rarity of the agentive passive in Arabic is bound to pose problems for translators. How can we move a noun phrase into end position if we can’t use prepositional phrases like “by a tiger”? I suspect that a native speaker of Arabic would resolve this problem by using a jumla (ﺠﻤﻠﺔ) fi’liyya (ﻓﻌﻠﻴﺔ), for the jumla (ﺠﻤﻠﺔ) fi’liyya (ﻓﻌﻠﻴﺔ) begins with a verb and is frequently employed to move noun phrases into end position.