14. The category of Voice

• Morphological expression of the relations between the action, its subject and object.

• grammatical Subject and Object (подлежащее и дополнение);

• semantic subject and object (субъект и объект);

• The form of the verb shows what semantic roles the grammatical Subject and Object perform in the sentence.

ACTIVE - The action issues from the grammatical Subject coinciding with the semantic subject – the doer of the action): He wrote the letter.

S_gr/sem O_gr/sem

PASSIVE - The action is experienced by the grammatical Subject (the semantic object), the Subject is acted upon: The letter was written (by him)

S_gr= O_sem O_gr= S_sem

Voice opposition

• Covers both finite and non-finite forms of the verb: writes^-- – is written⁺ to write^-- – to be written⁺ writing^-- – being written⁺

• The Passive form (marked / strong member of the opposition) — analytical: to be + Participle II

• discontinuous morpheme: be…en

• meaning of the marked member: the grammatical Subject is acted upon, it receives the action from the outside.

ACTIVE (weak member)

• presents the action as originating in the grammatical Subject, the Subject is not acted upon:

Lexically active (Kill, beat, break, etc.) and passive (suffer, see, hear, etc) (lexically passive in the active voice) verbs

The Middle / Neuter Voice?

The door opened; The paper burned; The water boiled.

• the form of the verb is active;

• the grammatical meaning: the process is going on in the Subject Є the grammatical meaning of the Active Voice: the Subject is NOT acted upon from the outside.

• Lexically passive verbs in the active voice.

Reflexive and Reciprocal Voices?

Verbs in the active form + reflexive pronouns – myself, yourself, ourselves, etc. or reciprocal pronouns – each other, one another —

free phrases and not analytical forms of the reflexive or reciprocal voices:

• the pronouns preserve their respective lexical meanings;

• can function as separate parts of the sentence:

She washed herself and her child (homogeneous objects).

Voice and Syntactic Structure

1. The Active construction

• for objective transitive verbs) – three obligatory elements: Subject, Predicate, Object: They cooked a slap-up supper.

• for subjective intransitive verbs – Subject, Predicate (no Object): He smiled. The door opened.

2 The Passive construction

• Essentially two-member: has only two obligatory members – the Subject (Semantic object) and the Predicate (the Object = the semantic subject – is optional) – short Passive: I was much interviewed and much photographed.

• the semantic subject may be expressed by the grammatical prepositional object (by-object) – long Passive: He was surrounded [by a ring of men].