Active voice is a
grammatical voice
In linguistics, grammaticality is determined by the conformity to language usage as derived by the grammar of a particular speech variety. The notion of grammaticality rose alongside the theory of generative grammar, the goal of which is to formu ...
prevalent in many of the world's languages. It is the
default voice for clauses that feature a
transitive verb in
nominative–accusative languages, including
English and most
Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the northern Indian subcontinent, most of Europe, and the Iranian plateau with additional native branches found in regions such as Sri Lanka, the Maldives, parts of Central Asia (e. ...
. In these languages, a verb is typically in the active voice when the subject of the verb is the doer of the action.
In active voice, the
subject of the sentence performs the action expressed by the main verb and is thus the
agent. For example, in the sentence "The cat ate the fish", 'the cat' is the agent performing the action of eating.
[O'Grady, William, John Archibald, Mark Aronoff, and Janie Rees-Miller (eds.) (2001). ''Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction'' Fourth edition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's. ] This contrasts with the passive voice, where the subject is the recipient of the action, such as in "The fish was eaten by the cat." The use of both active and passive voices in languages enhances versatility in sentence construction, allowing either the semantic agent or patient to assume the syntactic role of the subject.
[Saeed, John (1997). ''Semantics''. Oxford: Blackwell. ]
Even in sentences with
impersonal verbs, where no agent is specified, the verb form remains active, such as "It rains."
Examples
Below are examples demonstrating the active and passive voices with pairs of sentences using the same transitive verb across various languages.
See also
*
Anti-passive voice
*
Mediopassive voice
*
E-Prime, a version of the English language that excludes forms of the verb ''to be''
References
{{Reflist
Grammatical voices