"This has occurred.": passive voice?

[McNutty]

Ok, folks (Excalibre in particular), fight my ignorance. My understanding is that "This has occurred" is written in the passive voice. The subject of the sentence is the target of the action. Am I wrong about this? How?

[Giles]

No, it's the active voice. The subject ("this") did the action (occurring).

[Feirefiz]

It's not really in the passive voice. I don't know the proper English term for this phenomenon but the German equivalent translates to "nominal style." This refers to a style that uses almost only auxiliary verbs and avoids other finite verbs. Their content is expresses through nominalizations instead. Passives are very common in this style but it isn't the same thing.

Your problem is that you are mixing up two different layers. Passive is syntactic phenomenon. Syntax is concerned with the way how words can or can't be combined into larger units. The layer that deals with the meaning* assigned to those structures is semantics. "Target of the action" is a semantic construct. Passive cares about subjects and objects and but not about agents or targets. Usually the same meaning can have multiple syntactic realizations.


* We'll skip any rigorous definition of meaning. A common short answer is basically "truth conditions." The layers "above" that -- like how the choice of active or passive is significant -- are typically dealt with in pragmatics.

[McNutty]

No, it's the active voice. The subject ("this") did the action (occurring).

Hmm. How about "mistakes were made"? Could you make the argument that the mistakes did the action (of being made)? Is that also not passive voice?

[Feirefiz]

How about "mistakes were made"?

That's in passive voice.

Think of it as two general ways to contruct a sentence with the predicate "make":

A made B
B was made (by A)

This means that you can choose which of A or B one you want as the subject of your sentence. The choice is significant because in English one the positions where A can end up is optional and one isn't. That means you can avoid putting A into the sentence explicitly. The additional auxiliary and the different form of "make" (visible in other cases) tell the listener which mapping the speaker chose.

[Exy]

Okay, so I'm going to try to explain what passive voice means, and there's no real way to do this without involving some degree of technical terminology. I'm going to try to keep it minimal, but I'm also going to try to explain it thoroughly. This is going to depart some from the half-assed explanations of grammar that are (sadly) normal in education.

Take a typical transitive sentence. A transitive sentence is one involving two entities, which are typically noun phrases. Prototypically, a transitive sentence involves one entity acting on another:

(a) Ed kissed Cecil

There are two entities here, Ed and Cecil. Ed is performing an action: he's kissing someone. And there's someone being acted upon, Cecil, who was the recipient of Ed's affections. Ed is the subject of the sentence, and Cecil is the direct object. You can identify subjects in English by the fact that they typically precede the verb, and that the verb shows agreement with the subject (so, for instance, "he kisses", but "they kiss" -- the verb ending -s agrees with a singular 3rd person subject. There is very little subject-verb agreement in English, but many other languages feature more complex agreement marking.)

In a prototypical transitive sentence, the noun phrase (or NP) that's sitting in the subject 'slot' is an agent -- that is, it's some sort of entity performing an action, typically voluntarily. Whereas the NP in the direct object slot is typically a patient -- it's an entity that the action happens to. Note that this is not always the case: you can have sentences like I like potatoes, in which the subject is not really acting, and the direct object is not really being affected by some action. These are less typical, though -- but it gets at an important point: that is, that the subject of a sentence is often BUT NOT ALWAYS a agent, and the direct object is often BUT NOT ALWAYS a patient.

Notice that I defined 'subject' (and 'direct object') in syntactic terms -- based on the subject's position in the sentence, and on agreement phenomena. Whereas I defined 'agent' in semantic terms -- that is, based on the meaning of the sentence. Most or all theories of grammar would agree that subjects and direct objects are syntactic phenomena, whereas agents and patients are semantic phenomena, and it's generally accepted that syntax and semantics are two different parts of the human language faculty, which operate separately, in parallel, in producing or understanding sentences.

When English teachers define the subject of a sentence as something that performs an action, and the direct object as something that an action is performed upon, then, this is only sometimes accurate, and this stuff about "performing" or "being performed upon" is not really any kind of definition of the terms 'subject' and 'direct object', since they're trying to define syntactic phenomena in terms of meaning. But syntax and semantics are two separate things; that's why the definitions taught in English class tend to be mushy and fraught with exceptions -- they're trying to define 'subject' by making reference to the properties of 'agents' (and likewise with direct objects and patients) -- but those things don't always correspond.

So back to (a). I can recast this sentence like so:

(b) Cecil was kissed by Ed

(a) and (b) mean exactly the same thing. They are interpreted the same way, which means, semantically (that is, in terms of meaning) they are identical. Cecil is still the patient -- that is, the one being acted upon -- and Ed is still the agent. But Cecil is now the subject of the sentence. Ed is now the object of a prepositional phrase.

So the passive voice is a grammatical tool that permits a speaker to restructure a sentence. The patient, which would normally be in the direct object slot, is moved to the subject slot. The agent is demoted to a prepositional phrase (which is optional. Cecil was kissed is also a perfectly good sentence.)

In some languages -- Latin for instance -- there are special verb forms that are used in passive sentences. In English, we form a passive sentence by inserting a form of be and putting the main verb in the past participle form. (The past participle form is also the one you'd use in a sentence with a compound verb involving have, like She has eaten. In a regular verb, the past participle is identical to the past tense (She walked and She has walked) but most irregular verbs have distinct past tense and past participle forms: eat/eaten, drank/drunk, took/taken.)

English has an alternate passive, the 'get passive', involving get rather than be:

(c) Cecil got kissed

The typical complaining you hear about the passive voice revolves around the fact that the agent of the action is no longer required for a grammatical sentence:

(d) I made mistakes

is a perfectly fine sentence. But so is

(e) Mistakes were made

without an overt agent. The passive voice has been tainted with the impression that people use it as in (e) to avoid mentioning the subject of a sentence in order to avoid apportioning responsibility. Of course, realistically, there's no particular reason the passive voice should be associated with this -- after all, people come up with all sorts of ways to evade responsibility that don't involve the passive voice (like the worst sorts of crappy apologies: Bad things happened, and I regret it if anyone is unhappy doesn't involve the passive at all), and the use of the passive voice doesn't have to involve avoiding responsibility for things.

Notice that, interestingly, sentences that don't involve agents and patients tend to come out funny if you try to passivize them, as with the potato sentence above:

(f) ?Potatoes are liked by me

(The question mark preceding it is used in linguistics to mark sentences that are sort of questionably grammatical.)

Also, in English, things other than direct objects can be promoted to the subject position in passive sentences:

(g) John gave Charlotte a book

can be passivized in two ways:

(h) A book was given to Charlotte (by John) (in which the direct object, a book, was promoted to the subject position, as in (b))
(i) Charlotte was given a book (by John (in which the indirect object was raised to the subject slot. Many languages don't permit this.)

You can even promote some objects of prepositions to subject position:

(j) The dog peed on the rug
(k) The rug was peed on by the dog (notice that "on the rug" is a prepositional phrase, but the object of that preposition can be raised to subject position. Many languages don't permit this, and English only permits it sometimes, so that, for instance, *The table was peed under by the dog is totally impossible.)

There's a lot of poor style advice that basically boils down to "don't use the passive voice" but frankly most people can't successfully identify the passive. (Your big clues are that there's always a form of be or get, and the main verb is in the past participle form.) The passive voice is not just some general term to describe "mushy" sentences, or sentences attempting to exonerate someone from responsibility. Passive voice is a syntactic phenomenon that allows speakers to move a verbs arguments (that is, things like subjects and objects) around. This has occurred is definitely not the passive voice; it doesn't involve a patient in object position; in fact, occur can't even appear in transitive sentences. Intransitive verbs, like occur or sneeze, can't ever appear in passive sentences.

[Indistinguishable]

In case you're curious, "This has occurred" is in the perfect aspect, which, while also indicated via a construction using a past participle, is an entirely orthogonal matter to the active/passive voice axis. Indeed, "This has occurred" is no syntactically different from, say, "John has eaten", which hopefully no one would feel the urge to misidentify as passive. And remember, as everyone has tried to stress, the concept of passive voice is a purely syntactic one: the meaning is irrelevant; it's just the syntax that matters. Thus, "This has occurred", just like "John has eaten", must be in the active voice.

[McNutty]

The passive voice is not just some general term to describe "mushy" sentences, or sentences attempting to exonerate someone from responsibility.

Of course not, but it is often used that way, which is probably why folks like myself end up associating the two and distorting the meaning of the term "passive voice" in our own minds. "Mistakes were made" is weak and mushy because it uses passive voice to avoid naming who is responsible (not simply because it uses passive voice), and "this has occurred," while (apparently) not passive voice, suffers from the same lack of responsibility.

Thanks for the correction, though. Learn something new every day on the dome.

[eleanorigby]

Much has been learned here today. For this, thanks are given.