verbpassive

Verbpassive, or the passive voice, is a grammatical construction in which the subject of a clause is the recipient of an action rather than the doer. In a typical passive sentence, the object of an active sentence becomes the subject, and the agent performing the action may be omitted or introduced with a by phrase.

In English, the passive is formed with a form of the auxiliary be plus the past participle of the main verb: The letter was written. Tense and aspect are expressed through the auxiliary (The letter has been written; It will be written). Other languages mark passives differently: German uses werden plus the past participle (Der Brief wird geschrieben), while Turkish employs morphological passive endings. Some languages have multiple passive types, such as process passives that describe the action itself and state passives that describe a resulting condition.

Passives serve several functions. They foreground the affected participant (the patient) and de-emphasize or omit the agent, which is useful in formal or scientific writing, when the agent is unknown, irrelevant, or deliberately downplayed. The passive can also shift focus to the event's result or to a situation rather than to who performed the action. However, passives can introduce ambiguity when the agent is important or when its omission leaves the sentence unclear.

Variants of the passive include the get-passive in English, which often conveys change of state or a more colloquial tone (The window got broken). Some languages also employ impersonal or agentless passives, where the agent is not expressed at all. Across languages, the passive remains a central device for controlling emphasis, information structure, and discourse focus.