For example, to produce the sign for 'give' in ASL when the source/agent is neither the signer nor the sign interpreter and the recipient is the signer, the signer uses the basic handshake for 'give', moving one hand from the position of the giver in signing space to the signer's own chest. The direction would be the opposite if the roles were reversed.
Another form of agreement in ASL makes use of classifiers. Classifiers in ASL take the form of particular handshakes that represent general properties of things. For example, an index finger pointing upward represents a standing person, a cupped hand represents a container, and the extended thumb and first two finger represents a vehicle One use of classifiers is as morphemes agreeing with the subjects of verbs designating move events and be at states. In this case the agreement is the opposite of what happens with verbs of giving and telling. It is the handshake that represents the agreement morpheme and the movement of the hand(s) that represents the content of the verb. For example, to sign a sentence meaning 'the car is here', the signer would make the sign for 'car', then with the 'vehicle' classifier handshake sign 'be here', that is, move the hand downward in front of the body.
How is verb agreement in ASL like the verb agreement in the spoken languages we have considered? At least in many cases agreement in ASL is obligatory, as it is in spoken languages. It may also be redundant, as in the 'vehicle' example.
Agreement in ASL, in fact morphology in sign languages generally, is strikingly different from spoken language morphology in one way. It is invariably iconic; all of these examples we have seen «make sense». With respect to form alone, sign language grammatical morphology differs in another way from most spoken language grammatical morphology in that it occurs simultaneously with the root morpheme. Of course this derives from the potential in sign languages to maintain a particular handshake while a movement is executed.
One point of this section has been to show how much languages can vary in terms of what information gets represented on their verbs. It is on verbs that we see how different languages can get. Within our set of languages, we have seen a range of possibilities, but we still are not close to the extreme of some American Indian and Eskimo languages, like Inuktitut, where verbs frequently include more than ten morphemes. However, those words usually include morphemes that go beyond the functions we've discussed in this chapter. Such languages excel at creating new words from a small number of roots and extensive productive morphology. How this sort of process works is the topic of the next chapter.
In English as in many other languages, the passive voice is the form of a transitive verb whose grammatical subject serves as the patient, receiving the action of the verb. The passive voice is typically contrasted with the active voice, which is the form of a transitive verb whose subject serves as the agent, performing the action of the verb. The subject of a verb in the passive voice corresponds to the object of the same verb in the active voice. English's passive voice is periphrastic; that is, it does not have a one-word form. Rather, it is formed using a form of the auxiliary verb be together with a verb's past participle.
Canonical passives
Passive constructions have a range of meanings and uses. The canonical use to map a clause with a direct object to a corresponding clause where the direct object has become the subject. For example:
John threw the ball.[4]
Here, threw is a transitive verb with John as its subject and the ball as its direct object. If we recast the verb in the passive voice (was thrown), then the ball becomes the subject (it is promoted to the subject position) and John disappears:
The ball was thrown.
The original subject can typically be re-inserted using the preposition by:
The ball was thrown by John.
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.
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 form, the indirect object has been promoted and the direct object has been 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. (See Preposition stranding.) Indeed, in some sense it doesn't have an object, since «the problem» is actually the subject of the sentence.
It is possible to promote a content clause that serves as a direct object. In this case, however, it 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 so far have all been eventive (or dynamic) passives. There exist also stative (or static, or resultative) passives; rather than describing an action, they describe the result of an action. English does not usually distinguish between the two. For example:
The door was locked.
This sentence has two meanings, roughly the following:
[Someone] locked the door.
The door was in the locked state. (Presumably, someone had locked it.)
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 are not true passives; they occur when a participial adjective (an adjective derived from a participle) is used predicatively For example:
She was relieved to find her car undamaged.[5]
Here, relieved is an ordinary adjective, though it derives from the past participle of relieve In some cases, the line between an adjectival passive and a stative passive may be unclear.
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.
It is possible 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 but it is nonetheless attested in a variety of contexts
Past participle alone
A past participle alone usually carries passive force; the form of be can therefore be omitted in certain circumstances, such as newspaper headlines and reduced relative clauses:
Couple found slain; Murder-suicide suspected.
The problem, unless dealt with, will only get worse.
A person struck by lightning has a high chance of survival.
With get as the auxiliary
While the ordinary passive construction uses the auxiliary be, the same effect can sometimes be achieved using get in its place: Jamie got hit with the ball.
This use of get is fairly restricted. First of all, it is fairly colloquial; be is used in news reports, formal writing, and so on. Second of all, it typically only forms eventive passives of eventive verbs. Third of all, it is most often (but not necessarily) used with semantically negative verbs; for example, the phrase get shot is much more common than the phrase get praised.
An ergative verb is a verb that may be either transitive or intransitive, and whose subject when it is intransitive plays the same semantic role as its direct object when it is transitive. For example, fly is an ergative verb, such that the following sentences are roughly synonymous:
The airplane flew.
The airplane was flown.
[Someone] flew the airplane.
One major difference is that the intransitive construction does not permit an agent to be mentioned, and indeed can imply that no agent is present, that the subject is performing the action on itself. For this reason, the intransitive construction of an ergative verb is often said to be in a middle voice, between active and passive, or in a mediopassive voice, between active and passive but closer to passive.
Reflexive verbs
A reflexive verb is a transitive verb one of whose objects is a reflexive pronoun (myself, yourself, etc.) referring back to its subject. In some languages, reflexive verbs are a special class of verbs with special semantics and syntax, but in English, they typically represent ordinary uses of transitive verbs. For example, with the verb see:
He sees her as a writer.
She sees herself as a writer.
Nonetheless, sometimes English reflexive verbs have a passive sense, expressing an agentless action. Consider the verb solve, as in the following sentences:
He solved the problem.
The problem solved itself.
One could not say that the problem truly solved anything; rather, what is meant is that the problem was solved without anyone solving it.
Gerunds and nominalization
Gerunds and nominalized verbs (nouns derived from verbs and referring to the actions or states expressed by them), unlike finite verbs, do not require explicit subjects. This allows an object to be expressed while omitting a subject. For example:
The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Generating electricity typically requires a magnet and a solenoid.
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Many English educators and usage guides, such as The Elements of Style, discourage the use or overuse of the passive voice, seeing it as unnecessarily verbose (when the agent is included in a by phrase), or as obscure and vague (when it is not). This perception is exacerbated by the occasional intentional use of the passive voice to avoid assigning blame, such as by replacing «I made mistakes» with «Mistakes were made.»
Nonetheless, the passive voice is frequently used for a number of other reasons:
Certain verbs frequently appear in the passive – for example, be born, be smitten, and be had are all more common in certain senses than their active counterparts – though in many cases these might be better analyzed as adjectival passives (see above) than as true passives.
The passive voice serves to emphasize the patient; if the agent is comparatively unimportant to the point, or if the agent is obvious from context, then the passive voice might serve a rhetorical purpose.
Since in English, the subject nearly always comes before the object in a sentence, using the passive voice (i.e., promoting the patient from object to subject) moves the patient earlier in the sentence. If the patient has been mentioned in a previous sentence, this can serve as a marker of the connection between the two sentences.
Scientific writing has traditionally used the passive voice rather than mentioning a researcher in every sentence; this may be changing, however.
In journalistic writing and law, two areas where it can be essential to state only established facts, use of the passive voice allows uncertain agents to be omitted; again, however, use of the active voice is on the rise, with other mechanisms being used to avoid insupportable claims.
In linguistics, many grammars have the concept of grammatical mood (or mode), which describes the relationship of a verb with reality and intent. Many languages express distinctions of mood through morphology, by changing (inflecting) the form of the verb.
Because modern English does not have all of the moods described below, and has a very simplified system of verb inflection as well, it is not straightforward to explain the moods in English. (The English moods are indicative, subjunctive, and imperative). Note, too, that the exact sense of each mood differs from language to language.
Grammatical mood per se is not the same thing as grammatical tense or grammatical aspect, although these concepts are conflated to some degree in many languages, including English and most other modern Indo-European languages, insofar as the same word patterns are used to express more than one of these concepts at the same time.
Currently identified moods include conditional, imperative, indicative, injunctive, negative, optative, potential, subjunctive, and more. Infinitive is a category apart from all these finite forms, and so are gerunds and participles. Some Uralic Samoyedic languages have over ten moods; Nenets has as many as sixteen. The original Indo-European inventory of moods was indicative, subjunctive, optative, and imperative. Not every Indo-European language has each of these moods, but the most conservative ones such as Avestan, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit have them all.
It should be noted that not all of the moods listed below are clearly conceptually distinct. Individual terminology varies from language to language, and the coverage of (e.g.) the «conditional» mood in one language may largely overlap with that of the «hypothetical» or «potential» mood in another. Even when two different moods exist in the same language, their respective usages may blur, or may be defined by syntactic rather than semantic criteria. For example, the subjunctive and optative moods in Ancient Greek alternate syntactically in many subordinate clauses, depending on the tense of the main verb. The usage of the indicative, subjunctive and jussive moods in Classical Arabic is almost completely controlled by syntactic context; the only possible alternation in the same context is between indicative and jussive following the negative particle lā.
Classification
Realis
Realis moods are a category of grammatical moods which indicate that something is actually the case, or actually not the case. The most common realis mood is the indicative mood or the declarative mood.
Declarative
The declarative mood indicates that the statement is true, without any qualifications being made. It is in many languages equivalent to the indicative mood, although sometimes distinctions between them are drawn. It is closely related with the inferential mood (see below).
Generic
The generic mood is used to make generalizations about a particular class of things, e.g. in «Rabbits are fast», one is speaking about rabbits in general, rather than about particular fast rabbits. English has no means of morphologically distinguishing generic mood from indicative mood, however the distinction can easily be understood in context by surrounding words. Compare, for example: rabbits are fast, versus, the rabbits are fast. Use of the definite article the implies specific, particular rabbits, whereas omitting it implies the generic mood simply by default.[6]