Active voice is a
grammatical voice common in many of the world's languages. It is the
unmarked voice for clauses featuring a
transitive verb in
nominative–accusative languages, including
English and most other
Indo-European languages. A
verb in such languages is usually in the active voice when the subject of the verb performs the action named.
Active voice is used in a clause whose
subject
Subject ( la, subiectus "lying beneath") may refer to:
Philosophy
*''Hypokeimenon'', or ''subiectum'', in metaphysics, the "internal", non-objective being of a thing
**Subject (philosophy), a being that has subjective experiences, subjective cons ...
expresses the main verb's
agent. That is, the subject does the verb's designated action.
[O'Grady, William, John Archibald, Mark Aronoff, and Janie Rees-Miller (eds.) (2001). ''Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction'' Fourth edition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's. ] A clause whose agent is marked as grammatical subject is called an active clause. In contrast, a clause in which the subject has the role of
patient or theme is named a passive clause, and its verb is expressed in
passive voice. Many languages have both an active and a passive voice and this allows for greater flexibility in sentence construction, as either the semantic agent or patient may take the ''subject'' syntactic role.
[Saeed, John (1997). ''Semantics''. Oxford: Blackwell. ]
In a clause including an
impersonal verb, the verb is active in form, but no agent is specified.
Examples
In the following examples, the active and passive voice are illustrated with pairs of sentences using the same transitive verb.
See also
*
Antipassive voice
*
Mediopassive voice
*
E-Prime, a version of the English language that excludes forms of the verb ''to be''
References
{{Reflist
Grammatical voices