英語の受動態

Language Log » The passive in English Language Log Home About Comments policy The passive in English January 24, 2011 @ 7:00 am · Filed by Geoffrey K. Pullum under passives , Prescriptivist poppycock , Syntax , Usage advice « previous post | next post » Numerous Language Log posts by me, Mark Liberman, and Arnold Zwicky among others have been devoted to mocking people who denigrate the passive without being able to identify it (see this comprehensive list of Language Log posts about the passive). It is clear that some people think The bus blew up is in the passive; that The case took on racial overtones is in the passive; that Dr. Reuben deeply regrets that this happened is in the passive; and so on. Our grumbling about how these people don't know their passive from a hole in the ground has inspired many people to send us email asking for a clear and simple explanation of what a passive clause is. In this post I respond to those many requests. I'll make it as clear and simple as I can, but it will be a 2500-word essay; I can't make things simpler than they are. There is no hope of figuring out the meaning of grammatical terms from common sense, or by looking in a dictionary. Passive (like its opposite, active ) is a technical term. Its use in syntax has nothing to do with lacking energy or initiative, or assuming a receptive and non-directive role. And the dictionary definitions are often utterly inadequate ( Webster's , for example, is simply hopeless on the grammatical sense of the word). I will try to explain things accurately, and also simply (though this is not for kids; I am writing this for grownups). If I fail, then of course the whole of your money will be refunded. I won't be talking about passive sentences or passive verbs : sentences are too big and verbs are too small. I'll talk in terms of passive clauses . A clause consists, very roughly, of a verb plus all the appropriate things that go with that verb to complete a unit that can express a proposition, including all its optional extra modifiers. Sentences can contain numerous clauses, some passive and some not, some embedded inside others, so talking about passive sentences doesn't make any sense. Nor does "passive construction" if you define it, as Webster's does, as a type of expression "containing a passive verb form". That would be far too vague even if English had passive verb forms (in reality, it doesn't). This essay avoids using the term voice . That's the rather strange traditional name for the distinction between active and passive. It mainly confuses people: The active/passive "voice" contrast has nothing to do with finding your voice, or having a loud voice, or the authentic voice of the oppressed. I'll need to use three abbreviations: a noun-phrase like a storm , or storms , or the roof , or City Hall , will be referred to as an NP . A verb-phrase like blew in , or damaged the roof , will be called a VP And a preposition-phrase like with the others , or by a bear , will be called a PP . Fasten your seatbelt; here we go. Ten short sections follow. You can ignore the footnotes at the end of section 7 without much loss. 1. English has a contrast between kinds of clause in which one kind has the standard correspondence between grammatical subject and semantic roles (when a verb denotes an action, the subject standardly corresponds to the agent), and the other switches those roles around. In the kind of clause called passive some non-subject NP you would expect within the VP is missing, and that VP is understood with that NP as its subject . Take the verb damage as an example. Active uses of it involve a subject NP denoting a causer or initiator of damage — call that participant the wrecker . Since damage is a transitive verb, there is also a direct object NP. In this case it denotes something that suffers or undergoes damage; call that entity the victim . An active clause with the verb damage would be something like Storms damaged City Hall . Notice that the subject NP ( storms ) denotes the wrecker. In a passive use of damage (I won't give one just yet, but I will in a minute) you would see a form of the verb damage used in such a way that the subject of the clause does not denote the wrecker, but denotes the victim instead. (What about the NP that denotes the wrecker, then? As we'll see, it doesn't have to be expressed at all in a passive clause. But if it is expressed, it is put into a PP inside the VP. That PP has the head preposition by . You would add by storms , for example, to make it explicit what the agent was in a passive clause using damaged .) One more observation before we go on: given the meaning of the verb damage , we have an action that involves a doer (the wrecker) and an undergoer (the victim), but it is crucial that there isn't always a doer or an undergoer . John neglects the garden is an active clause with a transitive verb, but that doesn't mean it says that John does something, or that the garden has something done to it; the clause actually says exactly the opposite, that John does nothing to the garden! 2. Crucial to the form of passive clauses is the notion of a participle . Nearly all verbs in English (though not quite all) have two tenseless forms with special endings: the past participle , which typically ends in -ed (but for irregular verbs may end in -en or -t or have no ending or may have some yet more irregular form), and the gerund-participle , which always ends in -ing . Here are a few example forms for various verbs (I include for each verb the plain form that you would look up in the dictionary plus the 3rd singular present form ending in -s , and the preterite or simple past tense form, followed by both the participles in red): PLAIN FORM 3rd SG PRES PRETERITE PAST PARTICIPLE GERUND-PARTICIPLE break breaks broke broken breaking damage damages damaged damaged damaging go goes went gone going have has had had having keep keeps kept kept keeping nibble nibbles nibbled nibbled nibbling write writes wrote written writing Notice that for fully regular verbs like damage and nibble , and for some irregular verbs, the past participle is identical in written form and pronunciation to the preterite form. The relevance of participles is that a passive clause always has its verb in a participial form . (In the vast majority of cases it's the past participle, but there is an exception, to be considered later, in section 7 .) 3. Participles never have tense, yet virtually all kinds of English independent clauses are required to have tense. This means that a clause formed of a subject and a participial VP understood in the switched-around manner — what The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language calls a bare passive clause — can hardly ever stand on its own. But there are a couple of exceptions. One is newspaper headlines. Here is an imaginary headline that has the form of a passive clause and nothing else: City Hall damaged by storms Who or what is the wrecker here, semantically? The storms. And the victim? Obviously, City Hall , which is the subject of the clause that makes up this headline. The usual roles are reversed. Normally the wrecker would be denoted by the subject NP, placed before the verb, and the victim would be denoted by the object NP, after the verb. But in the headline above they are switched. Bare passive clauses are not only seen in headlines; one other place you see them is when they are used as modifiers. It's somewhat literary, but common enough. A couple of examples, with the bare passive clause modifier underlined: That said , we should keep in mind that things are more complex. The day's work done , they made their way back to the farmhouse. 4. The imaginary headline City Hall damaged by storms is not an ordinary independent clause in non-headline contexts. To make it into an ordinary independent clause, it needs a tense , either present or past. But since the verb of the passive VP has to be a participle, it can't have tense. So there has to be an extra verb . One verb that very commonly accompanies passive VPs to make passive clauses is the item known as be . Its plain form is be , but it has many other forms for specific grammatical contexts: am , are , aren't , is , isn't , was , wasn't , were , weren't , been , being . English often makes passive VPs into tensed clauses by using some tensed form of be . The subject goes before be rather than before the participle in the passive clause, and the rest of the passive clause comes after be (it's an internal complement in the VP). So to express in the preterite (simple past) tense the claim that storms damaged City Hall, we could employ the verb form was (that is, the simple past tense form of be is appropriate for a third-person singular subject), with City Hall as the grammatical subject, and following that the past participle damaged . To make the wrecker explicit, as I said above, we simply add the PP by storms . The result is the sentence on the right below: ACTIVE CONSTRUCTION PASSIVE CONSTRUCTION Storms damaged City Hall. City Hall was damaged by storms. The verb was doesn't really add any meaning, but it enables the whole thing to be put into the preterite tense so that the event can be asserted to have occurred in the past. Changing was to is would put the clause into the present tense, and replacing it by will be or is going to be would permit reference to future time; but the passive VP damaged by storms would stay the same in each case. (Notice, the participle damaged does not itself make any past time reference, despite the name "past participle".) 5. Using be is not the only way to make a passive clause that says storms have damaged City Hall. It is often true that a passive clause contains be , but not always . This is why it is so disastrous that ignorant writing tutors circle all forms of be that they notice, writing "Don't use the passive" in the margin (take a look at this terrible example ). They are picking up on a