passive voice

Promotion of other objects

One non-canonical use of English's passive is to promote an object other than a direct object. It is usually possible in English to promote indirect objects as well. For example:

• John gave Mary a book. → Mary was given a book.
• John gave Mary a book. → Mary was given a book by John.

In the active form, gave is the verb; John is its subject, Mary its indirect object, and a book its direct object. In the passive forms, the indirect object has been promoted and the direct object has been left in place. (In A book was given to Mary, the direct object is promoted and the indirect object left in place. In this respect, English resembles dechticaetiative languages.)
It is also possible, in some cases, to promote the object of a preposition:

• They talked about the problem. → The problem was talked about.

In the passive form here, the preposition is "stranded"; that is, it is not followed by an object.

Promotion of content clauses

It is possible to promote a content clause that serves as a direct object. In this case, however, the clause typically does not change its position in the sentence, and an expletive it takes the normal subject position:

• They say that he left. → It is said that he left.

Stative passives

The passives described above are all eventive (or dynamic) passives. Stative (or static, or resultative) passives also exist in English; rather than describing an action, they describe the result of an action. English does not usually distinguish between the two. For example:

• The window was broken.

This sentence has two different meanings, roughly the following:

• [Someone] broke the window.
• The window was not intact.

The former meaning represents the canonical, eventive passive; the latter, the stative passive. (The terms eventive and stative/resultative refer to the tendencies of these forms to describe events and resultant states, respectively. The terms can be misleading, however, as the canonical passive of a stative verb is not a stative passive, even though it describes a state.)
Some verbs do not form stative passives. In some cases, this is because distinct adjectives exist for this purpose, such as with the verb open:

• The door was opened. → [Someone] opened the door.
• The door was open. → The door was in the open state.

Adjectival passives

Adjectival passives are not true passives; they occur when a participial adjective (an adjective derived from a participle) is used predicatively (see Adjective). For example:

• She was relieved to find her car.

Here, relieved is an ordinary adjective, though it derives from the past participle of relieve,^[16] and that past participle may be used in canonical passives:

• He was relieved of duty.

In some cases, the line between an adjectival passive and a stative passive may be unclear, as in:

• The door was closed. (= The door was closed by [someone] = [Someone] closed the door OR = The door was not open.)

Passives without active counterparts

In a few cases, passive constructions retain all the sense of the passive voice, but do not have immediate active counterparts. For example:

• He was rumored to be a war veteran. ← *[Someone] rumored him to be a war veteran.

(The asterisk here denotes an ungrammatical construction.) Similarly:

• It was rumored that he was a war veteran. ← *[Someone] rumored that he was a war veteran.

In both of these examples, the active counterpart was once possible, but has fallen out of use.

Double passives

It is possible but it is not necessary for a verb in the passive voice—especially an object-raising verb—to take an infinitive complement that is also in the passive voice:

• The project is expected to be completed in the next year.

Commonly, either or both verbs may be moved into the active voice:

• [Someone] expects the project to be completed in the next year.
• [Someone] is expected to complete the project in the next year.
• [Someone] expects [someone] to complete the project in the next year.

In some cases, a similar construction may occur with a verb that is not object-raising in the active voice:

•  ?The project will be attempted to be completed in the next year. ← *[Someone] will attempt the project to be completed in the next year. ← [Someone] will attempt to complete the project in the next year.

(The question mark here denotes a questionably-grammatical construction.) In this example, the object of the infinitive has been promoted to the subject of the main verb, and both the infinitive and the main verb have been moved to the passive voice. The American Heritage Book of English Usage declares this unacceptable,^[17] but it is nonetheless recommended in a variety of contexts.^[18]

Passives without a past participle

Rarely, the passive voice can be expressed without the use of the past participle, as in^[19]

• That rash needs looking at by a specialist.

Here "looking at by a specialist" is a noun phrase serving as the object of the active verb "needs"; in the noun phrase the implied subject is rash, which is the patient of the verb look at, and the agent specialist appears in a prepositional "by" phrase