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The Passive in English (2011)

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu

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Re: The Passive in English (2011)

#31

Post by rendall »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #17
msla wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really points up the difference between linguists, who understand language, and grammarians, who merely peeve about it.

There is a difference between understanding linguistics and understanding language. Many linguists who carry the banner of descriptivism completely fail to do the latter. It’s one thing to understand that wearing dark formal attire to a funeral is just a part of etiquette without intrinsic meaning; it’s a whole nother matter to come to a funeral in a Hawaiian shirt and dismiss all criticism as judgmental.

I am fully onboard with the descriptive cause with respect to specific ideas like getting rid of the "split infinitive" formalism. Proudly put that adverb squarely between the "to" and the verb whenever the sentence flows better that way. It is bold to boldly go!

That said, whenever I hear or read "begs the question" when "raises the question" is meant, it feels like nails on chalkboard. If more people recognized actual question begging our politicians and pundits would have to work harder to lie.

Apparently, one can be a centrist on the prescriptivism-descriptivism axis

Re: The Passive in English (2011)

#32

Post by gjvc »

torstenvl wrote: post #23
tkgally wrote: post #2

I enjoyed this rant at the end of the article: “[T]he people who criticize the passive the most tend to use it more than the rest of us. George Orwell warns against the passive in his dishonest and rhetorically overblown essay "Politics and the English language". E. B. White does likewise in the obnoxiously ignorant little book by Strunk that he revised and put his name on, The Elements of Style. Both of these author…

> more than 20 percent of their clauses with transitive verbs are cast in the passive I smiled. Brilliantly played.

as always, source required for this statistic

Re: The Passive in English (2011)

#33

Post by tempodox »

tgv wrote: post #24
tempodox wrote: post #16

Passive voice should not be used in documentation of software.

Let's ignore that your sentence is in the passive voice, your reason is?

Passive voice typically does not specify the acting party. Merely stating that something will or should happen, without saying who or what is responsible for making it happen, is incomplete information.

Using passive voice for my original comment was tongue-in-cheek.

Re: The Passive in English (2011)

#34

Post by Varriount »

nicbou wrote: post #25
coliveira wrote: post #9

I aways took the aversion of English speakers against the passive voice as a sign of linguistic incompetence. Instead of teaching students how to write well on the passive and active voices, they prefer to reduce the language to its minimum denominator. The confirmation is in [1]: many journalists and writers don't even know how to define the passive. It is a sad thing to watch. [1] http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/p…

The hate is often justified. I write in English about German bureaucracy for non-native speakers from all over the world. Using active voice in the second person makes instructions far clearer if you have a tenuous grasp of the language. You know exactly who does what. I also find active sentences easier to parse in languages I'm not fluent in.

Out of curiosity, is your work publicly available? It sounds interesting.

Re: The Passive in English (2011)

#35

Post by pm3003 »

coliveira wrote: post #9

I aways took the aversion of English speakers against the passive voice as a sign of linguistic incompetence. Instead of teaching students how to write well on the passive and active voices, they prefer to reduce the language to its minimum denominator. The confirmation is in [1]: many journalists and writers don't even know how to define the passive. It is a sad thing to watch. [1] http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/p…

Most serious writing guides will tell you to avoid the passive voice, since in almost all cases the meaning is clearer in the active voice.

Re: The Passive in English (2011)

#36

Post by pm3003 »

mrkeen wrote: post #30

In Latin, deponent verbs are verbs which are written in the passive form but have an active meaning. The textbook I used said there are no deponent verbs in English. But it got me thinking, it must all be relative. Can native speakers of a language even think they have deponent verbs without having another language to compare to? English has "to be born". You could argue that it's passive (the active is "to bear"), b…

I speak French and studied Latin. We have so many language oddities (and of course 'exceptions confirm the rule') that we're not so quick to judge English.

The case of 'naître' is interesting. Naître is mostly used in the past (I/he was born). The direct translation is also in French its common past form 'Je suis né', which would also be the same as a passive voice, though in the present ('I am born' but the meaning wouldn't make much sense in French).

In the end, 'I was born' appears very logical to young French students (typically 9 to 12 years old depending on school and chosen language). It's usually taught at first as idiomatic.

Follow-up question for German speakers: I was sometimes asked 'When were you born?' as 'Wann bist du geboren?' which would be a word-for-word translation of the English. Is 'Wann wurdest du geboren?' with the passive auxiliary the only really correct form?

Re: The Passive in English (2011)

#37

Post by pm3003 »

tkgally wrote: post #2

I enjoyed this rant at the end of the article: “[T]he people who criticize the passive the most tend to use it more than the rest of us. George Orwell warns against the passive in his dishonest and rhetorically overblown essay "Politics and the English language". E. B. White does likewise in the obnoxiously ignorant little book by Strunk that he revised and put his name on, The Elements of Style. Both of these author…

I read both these texts and made myself the same reflexion. I'm not as vehement and thought it was a matter of discourse (who they write as and for, where they write from etc). Anyway, I found Politics and the English language uninspiring.

Re: The Passive in English (2011)

#38

Post by bradrn »

mrkeen wrote: post #30

In Latin, deponent verbs are verbs which are written in the passive form but have an active meaning. The textbook I used said there are no deponent verbs in English. But it got me thinking, it must all be relative. Can native speakers of a language even think they have deponent verbs without having another language to compare to? English has "to be born". You could argue that it's passive (the active is "to bear"), b…

> Can native speakers of a language even think they have deponent verbs without having another language to compare to?

Yes: it’s all based on the syntax of the single language in question. Latin has very distinct active and passive conjugations [0]; we know they’re active and passive because of the effect they have on the case assignations. Deponent verbs are those which cannot occur in the active conjugations.

More generally, categories like ‘deponent’ have to be justified language-internally. If you can only identify a category with reference to another language, it’s probably not of any relevance in the grammar of the language you’re studying [1].

[0] There’s a nice table in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_conjugation#Regular_conj...

[1] https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511810206.006 is an excellent overview of this, though unfortunately paywalled.

Re: The Passive in English (2011)

#39

Post by mrkeen »

pm3003 wrote: post #36
mrkeen wrote: post #30

In Latin, deponent verbs are verbs which are written in the passive form but have an active meaning. The textbook I used said there are no deponent verbs in English. But it got me thinking, it must all be relative. Can native speakers of a language even think they have deponent verbs without having another language to compare to? English has "to be born". You could argue that it's passive (the active is "to bear"), b…

I speak French and studied Latin. We have so many language oddities (and of course 'exceptions confirm the rule') that we're not so quick to judge English. The case of 'naître' is interesting. Naître is mostly used in the past (I/he was born). The direct translation is also in French its common past form 'Je suis né', which would also be the same as a passive voice, though in the present ('I am born' but the meaning…

As a French speaker, do you feel that 'manquer' is the wrong way around (subject and object reversed)? Or does English have it backward?

It's easy enough to just flip subject and object when translating, but I never gave much thought to how it would work in the passive voice.

I tried a few examples with Google Translate, but perhaps it's even more confused than I am:

    I miss him.         => Il me manque.
    He misses me.       => Il me manque.
    I am missed by him  => Il me manque.
    He is missed by me. => Il me manque.

Re: The Passive in English (2011)

#40

Post by mrkeen »

bradrn wrote: post #38
mrkeen wrote: post #30

In Latin, deponent verbs are verbs which are written in the passive form but have an active meaning. The textbook I used said there are no deponent verbs in English. But it got me thinking, it must all be relative. Can native speakers of a language even think they have deponent verbs without having another language to compare to? English has "to be born". You could argue that it's passive (the active is "to bear"), b…

> Can native speakers of a language even think they have deponent verbs without having another language to compare to? Yes: it’s all based on the syntax of the single language in question. Latin has very distinct active and passive conjugations [0]; we know they’re active and passive because of the effect they have on the case assignations. Deponent verbs are those which cannot occur in the active conjugations. More…

> Deponent verbs are those which cannot occur in the active conjugations.

That makes more sense. I learned deponent as "Active meaning, passive conjugation". It's only the "meaning" part that I think is subjective and/or relative.

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