lesson 8 index     printable pages

8.1: Active and Passive Voices in English

Verbs such as   φέρω, φεύγω (Lesson 2),and all the other verbs that we have used through lesson 6 were conjugated in the Active Voice or only had an Active Voice.  Thus you learned first a set of primary endings (for the Present and Future tenses), and later  (Lesson  6) a new set of secondary endings (for the only past tense we learned so far, the Imperfect).  All these endings are Active.  At the time I did not use this term, since there was nothing against which to contrast and understand it.   I explain now  the concept of Voices of the verb, beginning with the voices of English verbs.

In English there are two voices: Active and Passive.  The following are examples of the Active voice: They bring gifts, He flees, Jane sat there, She was tired.  To put it simply though a bit inaccurately, the subject of an Active verb either does something or is in a condition, situation, place, etc.  Expressions such as They were carrying, He is fleeing, Jane was sitting there, are progressive, but Active nonetheless.  Whether we represent the action of the Subject progressively (I am writing) or convey the information without reference to its progress (I write), is a distinction that is known as Aspect.  It is not a separate voice of the English verb.

So much for the English Active Voice.  In the Passive Voice the subject is not the doer but is acted upon.  Only transitive verbs (to write, to place, to understand) or verbs that can be used metaphorically as transitive (to live a good life, and the like) can be conjugated in the Passive Voice.  If I say Gifts are often brought, or Payment is being made right now, I use these transitive verbs in the  Passive Voice. To change an active verb to passive, all we need to do in English is put the verb to be in the same tense as the original verb and add the Past Participle of the verb we are conjugating.  A couple of  examples will show it best:

Active: Eighteenth-century archaeologists discovered the ruins of Troy.

Passive: The ruins of Troy were discovered by eighteenth-century archaeologists, or The ruins of Troy were discovered in the eighteenth century. In the first of these sentences I inform who were the doers, in the second I do not.  In other words, in the first example there is a grammatical agent, in the second there is not,

Clearly, an English verb may be at the same time progressive and passive: if the active expression is progressive, They were calling you, the corresponding passive is also progressive: You were being called.