The University of California’s eScholarship Repository has recently exceeded five million full-text downloads, according to the university.
The eScholarship Repository, a service of the California Digital Library, allows scholars in the University of California system to submit their work to a central location where any users may easily access it free of charge. The idea is to ease communication between researchers.
Catherine Mitchell, acting director of the CDL publishing group, says the number shows that both content seekers and creators have embraced the service, allaying concerns among researchers that others wouldn’t contribute to the repository. —Hurley Goodall
61 Responses to Database of Electronic Scholarship Surpasses 5 Million Downloads
Paul Trembath - May 11, 2012 at 6:11 am
But Bob is doing some submitting, the baby is doing some undergoing, etc., and this is the focus of those sentences. These are “actions” in a kind of formal sense, even if not the principal action you would think of when considering the scene that the sentences paint. I am not convinced this sense appears in a dictionary, but it seems to be what people mean when they say this kind of thing.
In the other examples, the letter Z and philology are being acted on in the same formal sense of “action”, by being preceded or believed about. ”Keeping tabs” is idiomatic, but the ringleaders are being observed or monitored. ”It” and “there” are dummy subjects, but nonetheless, pi has been “proved about” and the counterexamples (like the troublesome King of France) are being “believed about”. These are actions in the same formal sense, but obviously not physical actions.
pullum - May 11, 2012 at 6:39 am
Paul: I was well aware that this is what people would tend to say. But what’s happening is that you have confused the cart with the horse. What’s happening is that because we use the language the way we do — we use the same construction for saying that A performed an operation on B as we do for saying that B underwent an operation — you’re imagining that you’re seeing actions. It’s not that from the naive metaphysics of actions you can figure out whether a clause is active or passive; it’s that from the syntax of a clause you get a vague idea in your mind about whether some kind of action is going on. Nobody would normally say that Z is being acted upon simply because other letters precede it in the alphabet; but you’ve been taught to think that there ought to be such actions, so you’re imagining that you detect them. What I’m saying is that your (bad) grammar education is giving you misperceptions about what actions are.
pullum - May 11, 2012 at 7:01 am
It occurs to me that I should clarify (if it’s not too strange to reply to myself): by the phrase “your (bad) grammar education” I do not mean to imply any insult. It means “the bad information about grammar that through no fault of your own has been served up to you, and which you have patiently tried to absorb and believe”. The existence of the sort of false consciousness I am talking about is not the fault of consumers like you; it is the fault of members of my profession. The grammarians have been letting you down. For about 200 years at least.
Paul Trembath - May 11, 2012 at 8:14 am
I recognise your point of view and acknowledge your expertise. What I am unclear about is what you mean by “action”, and why I should accept it?
jffoster - May 11, 2012 at 8:46 am
Agree I do that “the grammarians” have been letting those who consult them down. But part of the problem is that they are not in your (or my) profession. You are a Linguist; they are traditional grammarians. The education of a traditional grammarian like Constance Hale includes very little, or usually no, Linguistics.
dank48 - May 11, 2012 at 9:04 am
Geoffrey is discussing the passive.
The passive is being discussed by Geoffrey.
Dan respects and appreciates Geoffrey’s expertise in grammar.
Geoffrey’s expertise in grammar is respected and appreciated by Dan.
Bob reluctantly submitted to an unpleasantly intrusive body search by TSA officers.
An unpleasantly intrusive body search by TSA officers was reluctantly submitted to by Bob.
The infant underwent an 11-hour operation at the hands of a team of neurosurgeons.
An 11-hour operation at the hands of a team of neurosurgeons was undergone by the infant.
The rabbit vanished when the magician waved his wand.
The rabbit was vanished when the magician waved his wand.
The council is receiving a blizzard of hate mail from angry residents.
A blizzard of hate mail from angry residents is being received by the council.
Mathematicians have proved that pi is an irrational number.
It has been proved that pi is an irrational number. / Pi has been proved to be an irrational number.
We don’t believe that there are any counterexamples.
There aren’t believed to be any counterexamples. / Counterexamples aren’t believed to exist.
We are keeping tabs on the movement’s ringleaders. / We are watching the movement’s ringleaders.
Tabs are being kept on the movement’s ringleaders. / The movement’s ringleaders are being watched.
All the other letters precede the letter Z.
The letter Z is preceded by all the other letters.
We include philology under linguistics in the statistical data.
Philology is included under linguistics in the statistical data.
Dan is not grasping the point of this article.
The point of this article is not being grasped by Dan.
dank48 - May 11, 2012 at 10:18 am
Among the things I don’t understand is ” (And by the way, I don’t mean because of the conflation of subjects
with what they denote—I’m ignoring that universally tolerated abuse.)”
3rdtyrant - May 11, 2012 at 10:27 am
Is it incorrect to say that the passive voice occurs when the agent of the action is not the subject of the sentence (i.e. the subject of the predicate, or that the agent of the verb’s action occurs in the predicate)? This is the definition I’ve used with my students, and it seems to fit what you’re saying. Your opening example shows that Ms. Hale is defining an object, not a passive “subject” (or agent of the main verb’s action).
wmatta - May 11, 2012 at 10:50 am
The author may have written this piece more to apply his apt analogy involving extraterrestrial beliefs than to discuss grammar.
lillirose51 - May 11, 2012 at 11:06 am
I think fall into that category of educated persons of whom Geoffrey speaks,but quite frankly I didn’t understand this piece at all…I have less idea now of what a passive sentence is than I did before, and I’m even less sure whether passive sentences are “good” or “bad” things to use. However, I can attest that English grammar is by no means the only field in which statements are made that are “(i) stated in essentially identical terms everywhere (it resembles mass plagiarism), and (ii) almost universally accepted, especially by educated people, yet (iii) patently false, as even a minute of reflection reveals.” If you have ever heard someone say or read somewhere or even stated yourself that “half of all marriages end in divorce” you have repeated the universally accepted but patently false fact about divorce.
dank48 - May 11, 2012 at 11:42 am
Or about marriage?
Actually, googling “divorce rate u.s.” leads to a number of sources that indicate that the divorce rate for first marriages in the U.S. is somewhere in the 40-50% range, for second marriages in the 60-67% range, and for third marriages in the 70-75% range. So “patently false” seems, well, patently false, or at least as much of an exaggeration as the “half” assertion.
This seems to me to have nothing to do with the active-passive topic. And there’s no way I can see to recast the previous sentence in the passive, or this one either, for which thank heaven.
espresso5 - May 11, 2012 at 12:09 pm
Dr. Pullum, please explain your excessive use of the word that. It seems many sentences would read just fine after taking out the word that. For example, “I was well aware that this is what people would tend to say,” vs. “I was well aware this is what people would tend to say.”
I have been wondering about the use of that for a while now and would appreciate some clarification on its use.
al451 - May 11, 2012 at 12:29 pm
Yes it is incorrect to say that. The article provided 4 examples where the “agent of the action” was clearly not the subject of the sentence, yet the mood of the verb was active not passive.
al451 - May 11, 2012 at 12:43 pm
Consider Hale: “In the active voice, the subject performs the action”. That’s not literally true. The subject of a sentence is a word, or a clause, or some grammatical entity like that. The thing that performs the action that a sentence talks about is some real-world entity like a human being, a rabbit, etc. The subject of the sentence is quite clearly not literally the thing that performs the action; but we often conflate the two and speak as if they were. That’s what “conflation of subjects with what they denote” means.
nordicexpat - May 11, 2012 at 12:47 pm
Not to speak for Pullum, but I believe that question is answered under #1 in the link explaining the passive:
“Take the verb damage as an example. Active uses of it involve a subject NP denoting a causer or initiator of damage — call that participant the wrecker”
Richard Grayson - May 11, 2012 at 2:24 pm
I thought that that “that” that that writer used was necessary.
lee1967 - May 11, 2012 at 2:27 pm
Like many academics, I care about writing and try to write well. (I also read Russian, and enjoyed the postage stamp that came with this article.) Am I alone in feeling that this article is mostly hair-splitting and irrelevant? Pullum demonstrates the not-very-profound point that some English verbs (receive, undergo, submit,etc.) connote that the grammatical subject is the recipient rather than the initiator of action. “Undergo” is so passive that a phrase like “It was undergone” is likely to be spotted only in very bad writing. But I’m looking for the “so-what?”and not seeing it. Like many writers, I generally opt for active rather than passive voice when I can make it work (which is most of the time). But I can do that without worrying about whether active subjects are invariably active. As far as I can tell, it makes no difference in how I write, nor in how I advise students, if I take Pullum’s point seriously, or ignore it altogether.
dank48 - May 11, 2012 at 2:29 pm
Oh, okay. I don’t think I’d have wandered into that particular minefield in any case, but I suppose it’s better to be warned about nonexistent dangers than not to be warned about real ones.
jffoster - May 11, 2012 at 3:14 pm
It matters if you want to understand how the world you live in actually works, part of which is how the particular language under consideration, English here, actually works.
dank48 - May 11, 2012 at 3:21 pm
As I understand “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell’s main objection to the passive is its ability to leave agency unstated, thus lending itself to those who wish to obscure responsibility, for whatever reason. “The writer was condemned to Sheol” is clear enough, so far as it goes, but the active voice would make clear who did the condemning: “The outraged readers condemned the writer to Sheol.” The active doesn’t work without the agent, whereas the passive does, thus leaving it unclear who or what performed the action.
Not that omission of the agent invariably signals sinister designs. I see no problem with:
You should avoid the passive.
The passive should be avoided.
brozema - May 11, 2012 at 5:32 pm
Before a verb can be classified as active or passive, it must be transitive. In the sentence, “The rabbit vanished when the magician waved his wand,” the verb “vanished” is not intransitive, and therefore a bad illustration of your point.
nordicexpat - May 11, 2012 at 5:32 pm
Mistakes were made- there were a lot of mistakes.
yabba - May 11, 2012 at 5:37 pm
I think the point of those examples is simply that the subject is not the same as an agent.
gavin_moodie - May 11, 2012 at 5:50 pm
Pullman’s explanation of the passive ‘clear and simple as I can’ is an essay of 2,500 words introducing several technical grammatical concepts. In my view this is too onerous to expect of most users of the language. So either any rule about the passive has to be relinquished or the common understanding of the passive has to be simplified.
jffoster - May 11, 2012 at 5:55 pm
Then rejoice and be glad that it’s English you’re dealing with. In quite a number of languages there is not only an active and a passive voice but also an ergative voice. And in others there is no active or passive, but there is an ergative and a a what is usually called in Linguistics an antipassive!
gavin_moodie - May 11, 2012 at 6:06 pm
Indeed. This was brought home to me when I started to learn German a few years ago. While presumably any language is easier to learn when one is immersed as a child, I am nonetheless grateful that my first language isn’t as heavily declined as many others.
yabba - May 11, 2012 at 7:40 pm
Prof. Pullum has spent a lot of time and effort on the issue of what the passive is or isn’t. And fair play to him: that’s his field and the extent of the ignorance can hardly be exaggerated.
But I think the ignorance about what the passive is (as a grammatical device) may be related to, and partly dependent on, ignorance about what it is good for. All the guff about the passive being bad presupposes that there is no useful function we might want it for. But it has one: quite simply, it is one way of getting a particular element of a sentence up to the front. Astonishingly little is said in any of the popular style books or by any of the language mavens about why we would want to place words early or late in sentences, what effects it might have and what tools are available for the job – although it is central to the technique of creating readable, understandable texts.
It’s even more astonishing when you realize that English, having lost quite a lot of inflection, is really a bit on the rigid side when it comes to sentence structure, with the result that sometimes the passive is necessary where it wouldn’t be in other languages. (E.g. in German, an OVS active clause is not the strained and exceptional thing it is in English).
So if the problem is ever to have inroads made into it, perhaps the attack needs another prong: we need to raise the awareness not just of grammar but of how we create emphasis and cohesion in texts.
djweatherford - May 11, 2012 at 7:47 pm
That’s sort of the idea I’ve tried to use in explaining passives to my students; in fact, I tell them they can often identify passives by looking for “by [somebody or something]” or sticking in “by George.”
Then they can tell that “The book was written [by George]” is passive, but “The book was lying on the table” isn’t.
And I used “tell that” on purpose; I usually appreciate seeing “that” to introduce clauses as objects; it alerts me to look for a verb down the road instead of stopping at the next noun; if the clauses are short, I don’t care, but if the clauses are long, I often find it helpful.
Ponce_de_Leon - May 11, 2012 at 7:52 pm
That’s a load of bobbins. Passive clauses are absolutely fine and should be used whenever they are appropriate. No competent writer, even those who claim to scrupulously avoid the passive, actually does avoid the passive. And using only the active doesn’t necessarily ensure that the reader can be certain about responsibility for actions.
From your example, “The writer was condemned to Sheol by the outraged readers” is both passive and quite clear about agency, whereas the similar sentence “Circumstances condemned the writer to Sheol” is active and gives the reader no clue as to who actually did what to who.
Consider another couple of sentences: ”Partisans of the 52nd Garibaldi Brigade captured Benito Mussolini on 27 April 1945. He was executed the following day.” The first sentence has an active clause (“Partisans captured Mussolini”) and the second sentence has a passive clause (“He was executed”). The agency is not obscured by having the passive clause – any competent reader will understand that the same partisans were responsible for Mussolini’s execution. To rewrite those two sentences using only active clauses would result in something like ”Partisans of the 52nd Garibaldi Brigade captured Benito Mussolini on 27 April 1945 and executed him the following day.” I would argue that this is no better and has an inferior rhythm.
Passive clauses can also be helpful when writing exclusively in the active voice would introduce new concepts in a funny order. “I had an accident in the car. It was hit by an ambulance that was forced to swerve when a tree was blown over by a gust of wind” is a long string of passive clauses and is no worse than “I had an accident in the car. A gust of wind blew over a tree which in turn forced an ambulance to swerve into me.”
Sometimes a passive clause is not only preferable but necessary. Would you use the sentence “Her mother bore her in 1969″? Or would you say “She was born in 1969″?
propergramma - May 12, 2012 at 8:32 am
“Before a verb can be classified as active or passive, it must be transitive.”
No, that is quite untrue.
In the first place, verbs are not active or passive; clauses are.
And in the second place, the clause “the rabbit vanished” is active, just as “the fighter punched” is active.
oh_richard - May 12, 2012 at 10:16 am
As somewhat who thinks of bad grammar like pornography (like several judges, I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it), I will offer this about passive voice.
Sometimes passive voice is used with simple ideas. He was born on on the first day of April…. All humans are born by their mother, so you are not trying to hide this important fact. Instead, you are trying to highlight the date of his birth – April Fool’s Day. This is a simple point.
Participant scores were converted to scaled scores for the presentation of the data in Table 2; however, participant scores were converted to t-scores for the actual analysis in Table 3. I can be pretty sure the researcher or assistant did the converting of the scores, and so you are not trying to hide this. Instead, you are trying to highlight that participant scores were converted twice into other numbers. This is a more complex point, but still simple enough.
Beyond that, I tell my graduate students, passive voice is evil. I sometimes make up Bible verses that imply that prophets warned horrible suffering would follow if people continued using passive voice. I sometimes write a paragraph explaining some important course point using as much painful passive voice as I can, and then ask students to decipher it. I dissuade many, but cannot convince all students to avoid passive voice.
I have found that 70% of the time, students use passive voice -solely- as a way to make their writing -sound- impressive, scholarly, or mature. Another 20% of the time students use it to avoid blame. I believe only 10% of the time students use it appropriately. As an ADHD adult, I struggle making sense of it. Why write so that the main idea is at the end of a long sentence, and only clear after I’ve read it twice? Why require me to read it twice to figure out that you are not going to tell me who did something?
Writing is about clear communication of ideas; more specifically, writing is about clear communication that should stand the test of time. Colloquialisms are too short-lived for long-term use, and hair-splitting grammar is too complex for clear communication.
All grammar and structure should serve this purpose.
Ponce_de_Leon - May 12, 2012 at 11:16 am
Passive voice isn’t evil. You’re giving your students bad and silly advice and what you’re telling them is mixed-up.
From your second paragraph, you are quite right that you would use passive voice to describe birth. However, the passive voice doesn’t “highlight the date of his birth” and using active voice wouldn’t “hide this important fact”. Compare your example “He was born on on the first day of April” to the similar sentence using active voice “His mother bore him on the first day of April”. The date has the same prominence and is not hidden. The sentence just sounds bizarre as we don’t refer to mothers bearing babies in English – we refer to babies being born.
When you give your students an example of a paragraph written using as much passive voice as you can, it isn’t badly written because it merely contains the passive voice. It is badly written because you have deliberately shoehorned the passive voice into clauses that no competent writer would use the passive voice for. You could just as easily write a paragraph solely containing transitive verbs in the active voice that is painful to read. In fact, you’ve managed that quite well in your post.
You’ve also fallen into the trap of assuming that using the active voice automatically attributes blame, as if every clause of every sentence that every writer writes requires responsibility to be apportioned. “A mistake was made by me that I take full responsibility for and my resignation has been accepted” contains two passive clauses and is quite clear and unambiguous to the reader. “Circumstances precipitated a mistake and I am leaving my role” contains two active clauses and is a load of waffly nonsense.
Writing will inevitably contain intransitive verbs and what your students need to consider is not whether each clause uses the active or passive voice but whether what they have written is clear and appropriate.
Writing is also patently not about clear communication that will stand the test of time – some writing may be but writing in general isn’t. It’s about conveying your meaning to your audience effectively. You wouldn’t use the same register to write a party invitation and a obituary, a doctoral thesis and a review of a stand-up comedian, or an affidavit and an email to your best friend. Good writers know this and are able to write accordingly.
Edit to add: Regarding your bad grammar is like pornography comment. It is also worth mentioning that a lot of what you seem to classify as bad grammar is merely stylistic preferences that have been used by every good writer in English ever. That is not an exaggeration. There simply isn’t a book that has been published that doesn’t use a significant number of intransitive verbs in passive clauses. Please, for the love of god, stop teaching your students this rubbish.
yabba - May 12, 2012 at 3:17 pm
But that’s exactly my point: “clear communication of ideas” is not a mystical level of enlightenment. We shouldn’t be telling people just to “be clear” and “omit needless words” – there are ways of explaining what makes a paragraph clear, and how to separate the needful words from the needless ones. This is the nuts and bolts of building texts, not magic. It needs instructions of the type “put the X here and the Y there”, and “to achieve P, consider the syntactic options Q, R and S” – not “this be evil” and “there be dragons”.
Joseph M. Williams (and Gregory Colomb) made a pretty good stab at this in Style: Toward Clarity and Grace.
You ask
Why write so that the main idea is at the end of a long sentence
– but surely sentences are things that combine multiple ideas; and they can’t all come at the beginning; therefore the concept of the “main idea” is not sufficient. We need ways of describing the ideas that are better off at the beginning, in the middle and at the end – and lo and behold, Williams did just that.
When it comes down to the mechanics of building sentences, by far the best book I’ve come across is by Siepmann, Gallagher, Hannay and Mackenzie, it’s called Writing in English: A Guide for Advanced Learners, and it is addressed specifically to German speakers (I am thinking specifically of their Module II). I admit, my reading is slight and unsystematic; there must be a version of this for native speakers somewhere; but having read this, I am baffled that no work of this kind belongs to the 3 or 4 books that writers in general regard as classics for beginners.
theatheist - May 12, 2012 at 5:00 pm
To get back to the subject of the post:
Pullum’s main concern, I think, is that typical grammar education confuses students when it uses the word “action” to describe what it is that verbs supposedly name.
I know there is truth to this because I teach English composition, and since 1986, the huge majority of my students have been regularly stumped by what should be a simple task: identifying the verb of a clause. (Let’s not even address their level of confusion when you introduce adjuncts and dependent clauses to a sentence.)
Sure, they do OK when the verb does indeed name a thing we would all regard as an action. “George kicked the ball out of the park” rarely causes trouble, because “kick” is clearly an action.
But when you throw verbs at them that don’t sound very “active,” they get very confused, even when the sentence is simple.
“The hat is on the chair.”
“I think about flowers all the time.”
“Is” and “think” really don’t sound active, do they? Yet they are the verbs, and only the better writers in your class are likely to know this.
Students *really* fall apart if you sneak something “active” into a participle:
“I saw John beating his dog.” If your students are typical, a significant proportion will identify “beat” or “beating” as the verb of this clause. Don’t doubt it for a minute.
Pullum’s point (if I may be so bold once again) is that the passive is poorly understood in large part because elementary grammar instruction does such a poor job explaining what it is that verbs actually do.
Self test. Describe a process for identifying the verb of a clause. (I’m not asking you to perform the task. If you’re reading the CHE, I assume you probably can. What I’m asking is if you can describe the process so that a ninny could do it.) Here’s how you did: If the concept of “time” or “tense” did not spring to mind, you probably don’t know. You’ve been operating on instinct.
oh_richard - May 12, 2012 at 9:46 pm
I don’t know if I feel as strongly as you do… But I’ll respond with a few points…
1) Every good English writer may have used these stylistic elements, but many of the students in my class are not good writers. Their party invitations, emails, and such may be well written for their purposes, but I have to teach them how to start writing their first professional works, which -will- be around for many years. These students may -become- good writers of reports and evaluations for gradeschool teachers, parents, lawyers, case managers… with experience and with the help of advanced mentors and instructors, but they are not now.
“Use active voice… ” may not help them fix all writing problems, but this advice will help them fix many of them. “Because passive voice is evil”… may not be the truth, but “Because APA style says to…” clearly isn’t effective either.
If I taught graduate students who plan to write for a profession (and if I myself wrote well enough to do this as my profession) then maybe I would feel as you do.
2) You’re right that passive voice and blame are technically two separate and unrelated things. However, I see them together often enough to suspect a link.
Take “The matching process was completed without my rankings…” or “My grade was reduced after I submitted my final paper and exam…” You could undoubtedly use active voice and still avoid admitting that you did not turn in your rankings or that you submitted a poor quality paper and exam. However, such “waffly nonsense” apparently takes too much time to craft … or so it seems from the emails of students like the two who provided these explanations.
nordicexpat - May 13, 2012 at 2:59 am
What do you think a participle is, if it isn’t a verb form? Your students weren’t necessary wrong, since the *sentence* “I saw John beating his dog” contains two clauses: “saw” in the verb in the independent clause, “beating” is the verb in the dependent one. (most) independent clauses have tensed forms of the verb (“be” in an imperative like “Be prepared” is not a tensed form, nor is “save” in a subjunctive like “God save the Queen”), so your test is completely wrong, but it only applies to a limited number of clauses. See #2 on Pullum’s link to the passive.
al451 - May 13, 2012 at 7:34 am
It’s not as nonexistent as one might think. Part of the confusion that Pullum is criticising is the attempt to infer syntax from semantics (as he puts it, “trying to squeeze syntactic blood out of the turnip of naive metaphysics”). For example, the familiar attempt to characterise the passive voice in terms of the meaning of the sentence in which it appears. If you avoid conflating words/phrases/etc. with the things they refer to, this confusion becomes easy to see and avoid.
Ponce_de_Leon - May 13, 2012 at 10:34 am
@chronicle-62830bae964acdc2436c51feff2f7ccd:disqus
Edit – this is actually a response to the post below.
1) Every good writer uses the passive voice, as does every competent writer. Some bad writers use the passive voice, some overuse it and some use it despite thinking that they don’t. Everyone uses the passive voice.APA style says not to use the passive voice yet the APA Publication Manual uses it. From the first sentence of the introduction (THE FIRST SENTENCE OF THE INTRODUCTION!), “The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association was first published in 1929″. It is a lot harder to avoid the passive voice in normal written English than it is to use it competently – please remember that next time you tell students whose written English isn’t as strong as it could be. By telling them to avoid the passive voice, you are actually making it harder for them to write well.
2) This is crazy. The use of passive voice these sentences is completely irrelevant.In the first one, how is “I/We/They completed the matching process without my rankings…” clearer than “The matching process was completed without my rankings…”? I’m not sure of the context here but neither sentence is explicit about the rankings not being handed in. The sentence “I did not hand in my rankings in time for them to be used in the matching process” is much clearer and uses transitive verbs in both active voice (I did not hand in my rankings) and passive voice (them to be used in the matching process). Note that the second clause would arguably be less elegant to read in active voice (“I did not hand in my rankings in time for us to use them in the matching process”) though I would not criticise somebody who chose to write that.
The second sentence rewritten using the active voice would read “My teacher reduced my grade after I submitted my final paper and exam…” and I’ll be blowed if I can see how that is any better at admitting to having submitted a poor quality essay and exam than “My grade was reduced after I submitted my final paper and exam…”. What you are looking for is something like “My grade was reduced as I submitted a poor quality paper and exam…” (passive/active) or “My teacher reduced my grade as I submitted a poor quality paper and exam…” (active/active). Either way, in the transitive verb reduced it is implicit in this context that the teacher will be doing the reducing of the grades so using the passive voice doesn’t have any impact whatsoever on the reader’s understanding. What is important is that the reader understands that the paper and exam are of a poor quality – something that is done by using adjectives.
Ponce_de_Leon - May 13, 2012 at 3:42 pm
The point remains though that many students would have trouble picking out a verb that isn’t obviously “active”.
How easy would it be, using the definition of a verb as a “doing” word, to identify the verbs in the following:
“After the fight, I saw John.”
“When the action is finished.”
“What are these goings-on?”
“He knows the pain of a heart attack.”
“Just what I thought – suicide!”
“Flash! Bang! Wallop! What a picture! What a picture! What a photograph! Poor old Eve, there with nothing on, her face all red and her fig leaf gone.”
theatheist - May 13, 2012 at 5:58 pm
Yes, thank you. Better examples than mine. Really, as an unpaid commenter, I should not work in haste.
magyar - May 13, 2012 at 6:01 pm
I might have got this wrong but I didn’t think that statements such as “there were a lot of mistakes” were in the active voice. Or were you joking…?
theatheist - May 13, 2012 at 6:13 pm
OK, you got me on tensed verbs. More correctly I should have said “inflected,” anyway, but you still have me.
But surely it is the group of exceptions that is limited. I don’t personally go around saying “God save the Queen” or “Saints be praised” nearly as often as I say things like “I’m late for class” or “Where is my phone?” Imperatives, somewhat more often.
Then again, my *main* point was that verbs cannot regularly be identified by the simple heuristic, “Find the action.” You’ve simply reinforced that.
As to the “beating” example, you are technically correct. Out of habit, I referred to the finite verb and therefore to the independent clause, but without explicitly saying so. Sloppy, I suppose. But I would not have deceived my students in any case, since convention would have obliged me to ask them something like “which word is the main verb.” Not exactly linguistic terminology, but it is the language of K-12.
Socratease2 - May 14, 2012 at 1:51 pm
How the world works? How English works? Not sure I understand your use or the verb “work.” If this discussion tells me how English works, I am confused since all I see is a semantic/syntax debate that rises far beyond anyone’s practical need to understand the difference between active and passive voice. But if your point is that language rules, like life, are capricious and inconsistent, then certainly I agree.Clearly, English does not “work” well since most grammar books continue to pump out falsehoods and misinformation.
But, that aside, how does this grammar point tell me anything about how the world I live in actually works? Language imposes an arbitrary and artificial filter on the world, how does knowledge of such arbitrary rules tell me about the world. A discussion on whether grammar is innate or learned might tell me something important about the natural “lived world.” What does grammar itself reveal about the world we live in?
jamescurrin - May 14, 2012 at 2:53 pm
“It has been proved that pi is an irrational number.” And I was taught that the past participle of “prove” was “proven”. It just proves that Mr. Pullum’s thesis about the unreliability of instruction in grammar is correct.
Ponce_de_Leon - May 14, 2012 at 7:21 pm
Don’t be so hard on yourself. What you were taught is also correct. From the Oxford Dictionary:
For complex historical reasons, prove developed two past participles: proved and proven. Both are correct and can be used more or less interchangeably ( this hasn’t been proved yet; this hasn’t been proven yet). In British English proved is more common, with the exception that proven is always used when the word is an adjective coming before the noun: aproven talent, not a proved talent.
ramanujam - May 15, 2012 at 2:55 am
I
agree with Geoffery. The
problem is not only with grammar rules; it extends to any aspect of the English
language. A couple of weeks ago, I
had occasion to thumb again the yellowing pages of the musty, old copy of The King’s English in my college
library. I found it difficult to accept
several of the Fowlerian precepts, especially the Fowler brothers’
“practical rules in the domain of vocabulary”.
“Prefer
the concrete word to the abstract” is one of the precepts. On the face of it, it is sound advice because
abstract words are, after all, enemies of precise expression. But not quite sound, if you examine it
carefully. We often talk about our – and
other people’s – attitudes and feelings.
We will not be able to talk about them, if we decide to use only
concrete words for joy and sorrow and love and anger.
“Prefer
the single word to the circumlocution”, say the Fowler brothers. “No” is certainly preferable to the
pedantic “The answer is in the negative.” But there are situations in which
“No” would be considered blunt and therefore impolite. Whether one should use the single word or the
periphrasis depends on the context or the occasion.
“Prefer
the short word to the long” is the third rule. I do like short words, but, as a writer, I
have often found long words more effective than short words in the expression
of emotional ideas.
“Stupendous” and “magnificent” are much more
powerful than “large” and “grand”.
The
last rule is: “Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.” In other words, avoid Latin derivations where
native words can serve the purpose. It
is a lame-duck rule. Even at the time of publication of The King’s English, the distinction between the Anglo-Saxon element
and the Latin element had ceased to be of any importance. And now, in the context of what David Crystal
calls “World Englishes”, the cry for Saxon English or the pedigree of
English words would only be a voice in the wilderness.
“Break
any of those rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous”, said
George Orwell, author of Animal Farm,
four decades later. He was a very
sensible man.
nordicexpat - May 15, 2012 at 6:12 am
Hi. No, I wasn’t joking. An existential construction like “There were a lot of mistakes” is active voice. There’s not a participle to be found there, so it is different from “a lot of mistakes were made.”
dank48 - May 15, 2012 at 12:10 pm
Sorry; when I wrote, “The active doesn’t work without the agent, whereas the passive does,” I meant with any given verb in both moods. “Mistakes were made” is correct and passive, but “[No subject] made mistakes” doesn’t fly. “There were a lot of mistakes” is correct and active, but “A lot of mistakes [good luck with a passive construction of 'to be']” just ain’t English.
dank48 - May 15, 2012 at 12:14 pm
Per MWCD10, “vanish” can be transitive, with the meaning “to cause to vanish.” It’s unusual, and it’s imo a bit strained, but it’s real.
dank48 - May 15, 2012 at 12:23 pm
I think you’re taking what I said as a stronger claim than I was making. Of course the passive is useful and perfectly valid and often more appropriate, as in the examples you supplied. My point was merely that the passive can be used to obscure agency, not that it always is. To achieve the same effect with the active is a bit harder, as in “Circumstances condemned the writer to Sheol” rather than “Outraged readers condemned the writer to Sheol,” where a vague abstract word is substituted for the specific concrete one.
It’s a bit like euphemism and circumlocation, which have legitimate uses. So-and-so “attending to a personal errand” may well be preferable to the specifics about what bodily functions are being attended to. On the other hand, it’s far easier to say “Undesirable elements have been liquidated” than “Our troops have liquidated undesirable elements,” much less “Our troops have executed civilians of ethnic groups we have no use for.”
nordicexpat - May 15, 2012 at 1:47 pm
Hi,
Sorry, I don’t really get your point here. What do you mean by “any given verb in both moods?” And what are you getting at in that last sentence?
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dank48 - May 15, 2012 at 5:08 pm
(Replying to yours that begins “Hi, Sorry . . .”)
I mean that if the same verb is used in both the active and the passive, the active construction will generally need an agent, aside from the “There” and “It” dummy subjects. “Mistakes were made” vs. “[Someone or other] made mistakes” but there’s no passive for “to be,” so “There were a lot of mistakes,” while active, doesn’t have a passive form for comparison. My expression was, to say the least, imperfect.
So’s this, no doubt. Long day.
magyar - May 15, 2012 at 6:51 pm
Thanks. Useful bit of learning: I had always taken existential statements as a class of their own.
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Seth - May 17, 2012 at 12:56 pm
A fun linguistics puzzle for anyone who comes back into the room:
It is ungrammatical to passivize the sentence, “It rained cats and dogs.” Why?
theatheist - May 18, 2012 at 10:43 am
Offhand, I’d guess that “cats and dogs” is being used as an adverbial phrase.
dank48 - May 18, 2012 at 1:46 pm
In my best wandering-into-the-woods-with-not-enough-eggs-in-my-basket manner, I’ll take “It” as the dummy subject, “rained” as the active verb, and “cats and dogs” as the compound direct object. So a passive version might be “Cats and dogs were rained” or “Cats and dogs were rained by it.” Either one is a lousy excuse for English, imo.
It’s been a long week, and I may be humor-impaired. What’s fun about this?
harleymc - May 20, 2012 at 3:27 am
Thought I’d add my 2 cents worth to your response to lillirose’s assertion that a minute’s worth of reflection shows divorce statistics to be false. After several minutes of reflection i realised I had no idea as to the rates in Australia so here’s the Australian Bureau of Stats figures.
Crude marriage rate (2010) was 5.4 marriages per 1,000 estimated resident population, crude divorce rate in Australia was 2.3 divorces granted per 1,000 estimated resident population. The median duration of marriage to divorce has increased from 10.2 years
in 1989 to a peak of 12.6 years in 2005. It has since declined to 12.3
years in 2010.Source http://www.abs.gov.au/ accessed 2012/05/20. Marriage rates have not variesd greatly in the previous decade so that gives an approximate rate of 42.6%. Half is an over-estimation but it is still a fairly good rough approximation.
Nothing like finding an authoritative source to debunk or confirm a patently flawed mind experiment.
Seth - May 22, 2012 at 5:02 pm
dank48 got it. Dummy subjects (expletives) can’t appear in prepositional phrases, so “were raining by it” just doesn’t work. However, theatheist may be on to a different analysis that I hadn’t considered.
Seth - May 22, 2012 at 5:02 pm
Grammar is its own fun!