In grammar, the Voice of a verb describes the relationship between the action (or state) that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its arguments (subject, object, etc.). When the subject is the agent or doer of the action, the verb is in the
active voice. When the subject is the patient, target or undergoer of the action, it is said to be in the
passive voice.
читать дальшеThe verbal category of voice shows the direction of the process as regards the participants of the situation reflected in the syntactic construction.
Wrote – was written
Meaning – direction of the action, whether the action is represented as issuing from its subject or as experienced by its object.
• He wrote this letter yesterday. – This letter was written yesterday.
Besides there 2 Voice some authors speak of some more Voice forms. The most popular are the Reflexive Voice and the Reciprocal Voice and the Middle Voice.
Some languages have a middle voice. This is a set of inflections or constructions which is to some extent different from both the active and passive voices. The middle voice is said to be in the middle between the active and the passive voices because the subject often cannot be categorized as either agent or patient but may have elements of both. For example, in The casserole cooked in the oven, cooked is syntactically active but semantically passive.
Prof.Barkhudarov considers the middle meaning to be part of the active voice meaning. If it were part of the passive voice meaning it would be possible to use the by-phrase: ٭The bells rang by John; ٭The fabric washed by the girl.
Reflexive voice: He hurt himself. Meaning – the action is concentrated on one and the same person. Form – verb + reflexive pronoun. But reflexive pronouns can be omitted and the meaning of reflexivity remains: He shaved and dressed. Prof. Ilyish: He hurt himself and the child. Besides: He makes toys – He makes mistakes. And not always reflexive pronouns can be omitted: He found himself in a dark room.
Reciprocal voice: They met each other at the station. Meaning – mutuality of the action. The subject is often plural. Form – verb + reciprocal pronoun. But They met at the station.
Other voices: it’s a matter of approach if the idea of the Voice depends on the meaning – I wash myself – the reflexive Voice; but if we consider Voices as a grammatical category with special markers, we can’t say that it is a voice. There is no special way of expressing the RV and the R pronoun is not obligatory – it’s not a special category. The existence of various means of expressing voice distinctions makes it possible «to consider voice as a functional-semantic category with the grammatical category of voice as its center and other means of expressing voice as a periphery.