The Passive Voice Reconsidered

Abstract

The Passive Voice is an important issue of English grammar. First I am going to analyze the similiarities as well as the differences between the active and the passive voice. I am going to use several sources by O’Grady et al. (1993), Quirk et al. (1985), Huddleston and Pullum (2002), Eastwood (1994), Cobuild (1990), Dixon (1992) and Alexander (1991), for instance to illustrate the differences betwen the active and the passive voice. Then I am going to focus on the different types of passive voice, like be- and get-passives, the short as well as the long passive, the verbal, prepositional, and adjectival passive; the central passives, semipassives and the pseudo-passives. In the fourth chapter of my thesis I am going to compare the English passive voice with the German passive voice in terms of structure, use, and contexts. In the last part of my analysis I am going to represent some websites dealing with the passive voice in order to see to what extent the passive voice is covered on the Internet.