Nynorsk uses ' å verte' or ' å bli' + past participle for passive voice, and Swedish and Danish use the passive suffix ' -s' and Icelandic uses ' að verða' or ' að vera' + past participle or '- st' suffix for middle voice. The passive forms in Nynorsk are restricted to being accompanied by an auxiliary verb, which is not the case in Swedish and Danish. Norwegian ( Nynorsk) and Icelandic have a similar system, but the usage of the passive is more restricted. Examples of languages that indicate voice through conjugation include Greek, Latin, and North Germanic languages such as Swedish.

In some languages, passive voice is indicated by verb conjugation, specific forms of the verb. The passive voice may also be used to avoid specifying the agent of an action.ĭifferent languages use various grammatical forms to indicate passive voice. This may be done to foreground the patient, recipient, or other thematic role it may also be useful when the semantic patient is the topic of on-going discussion. The use of passive voice allows speakers to organize stretches of discourse by placing figures other than the agent in subject position. Many languages have both an active and a passive voice this allows for greater flexibility in sentence construction, as either the semantic agent or patient may take the syntactic role of subject. This is not always the case for example in Japanese a passive-voice construction does not necessarily decrease valence. Thus, turning an active sense of a verb into a passive sense is a valence-decreasing process ('detransitivizing process'), because it syntactically turns a transitive sense into an intransitive sense. Typically, in passive clauses, what is usually expressed by the object (or sometimes another argument) of the verb is now expressed by the subject, while what is usually expressed by the subject is either omitted or is indicated by some adjunct of the clause. In contrast, the sentences 'Someone pulled down the tree' and 'The tree is down' are active sentences. For example, in the passive sentence 'The tree was pulled down', the subject ( the tree) denotes the patient rather than the agent of the action. This contrasts with active voice, in which the subject has the agent role. In a clause with passive voice, the grammatical subject expresses the theme or patient of the main verb – that is, the person or thing that undergoes the action or has its state changed. A passive voice construction is a grammatical voice construction that is found in many languages.

English active vs passive voice