What’s a Passive?

I am not prepared to engage in the Passive Wars. As with any dispute, however, it behooves us to know what the heck it is we’re fighting about. As my colleague Geoffrey Pullum and others have observed, verb constructions described as passive often aren’t any such thing, and the very word passive suggests a kind of prose that lacks get-up-and-go, or whatever it is our sentences ought to have. Here, though, I want to draw our attention to a point of confusion that plagues even the most committed passive-watchers among us: the distinction between verbs in the passive voice and past participles used as predicate adjectives, or subjective complements.

Take, for example, a string of sentences in a recent Lingua Franca post (used by permission of my colleague Ben Yagoda):

The partial participation of newcomers is by no means “disconnected” from the practice of interest. Furthermore, it is also a dynamic concept. In this sense, peripherality, when it is enabled, suggests an opening, a way of gaining access to sources for understanding through growing involvement. The ambiguity inherent in peripheral participation must then be connected to issues of legitimacy. …

Wow. Those are some awful sentences. But are the bolded sections passive constructions? Close observers of syntax have offered several tests.

1. The test of adding very. Very is an adverb that modifies only adjectives and other adverbs; you can’t say She runs very the way you can say She runs quickly. So some grammarians suggest sticking very in before the past participle to determine if it is part of the verb or if it is functioning as a subjective complement. Thus The ice cream was very frozen, but not The bomb was very detonated: ergo, was frozen is not a passive construction, but was detonated is. This test runs quickly into problems. I can write I was very surprised and mean it as a description of my state of mind, but if I add by your present to the sentence, I have created a passive construction (I was very surprised by your present). Confusing, right? So let’s move on.
2. As the last example suggests, the presence of a prepositional phrase beginning with by could suggest that the past participle is part of a passive-voice verb; alternately, the presence of a noun clause might indicate a state of mind. For instance, The jury was convinced that the defendant was innocent gives us the state of the jury’s mind, whereas The jury was convinced by the lawyer’s argument gives us the lawyer’s action as a passive-voice construction. The problem here is that the clause and the prepositional phrase are not mutually exclusive; you can easily say The jury was convinced by the lawyer’s argument that the defendant was innocent. Let’s move on.
3. My favorite test is the simple reversal of the voice from passive to active. I was abandoned by my mother = My mother abandoned me. There’s wiggle room here when the by-phrase is absent: I was abandoned, by itself, could indicate an action that was performed or a feeling I’m experiencing; no way to tell. Still, it’s a starting point.
4. Finally, since a past participle used as a subjective complement is essentially functioning as an adjective, it should be replaceable by an adjective without the sentence’s going haywire. Absent context, in The door was locked, we cannot say for sure if we mean something akin to The door was locked by her captor. But if we can replace locked with immovable without undue harm to the sentence, then locked is functioning as a predicate adjective. Conversely, in I was slammed against the door, writing I was uncomfortable against the door just doesn’t cut it; was slammed is a passive-voice construction even if we don’t know who did the slamming.

None of these tests is foolproof. But if we return to the passage above, we can apply at least one or two of them to the boldface phrases and come up with a conclusion. In “The partial participation of newcomers is by no means ‘disconnected’ from the practice of interest,” we can add the adverb very to disconnected; there is no by phrase; we cannot turn the verb around to create an active-voice sentence (“So-and-so disconnected the partial participation of newcomers”? I don’t think so); and we can substitute the adjective discontinuous for disconnected without harming the meaning of the already convoluted sentence. My conclusion, then, is that this is not a passive construction but a wordy description of the participation in question.

How about “peripherality, when it is enabled, suggests an opening”? Very enabled doesn’t sound right. But there’s no by phrase, and I don’t sense any agent doing the enabling; we could turn the clause around and write when we enable it rather than when it is enabled, but I’m not confident that we are present even in a shadowy way in this sentence. Finally, I wouldn’t mind substituting functional for enabled. So I would still call enabled here a predicate adjective rather than part of a verb.

In “The ambiguity … must then be connected to issues of legitimacy,” I think we have a genuine passive. Sure, there’s no by phrase. But adding very to connected changes not only the meaning but the syntax of the sentence. I get the sense that someone — we, probably — needs to be doing this connecting, so I can create an active-voice sentence. And substituting an adjective like pertinent for connected doesn’t make sense in a sentence that is advising some kind of action.

I’ve gone on at some length. Why on earth does it matter? Well, the Passive Wars are about the quality of writing, about whether overuse of passive voice does harm to prose. If we learn to distinguish between passive voice and state-of-being expressions that use past participles as predicate adjectives or subjective complements, those who wish to denounce whatever they think is doing harm to prose (particularly student prose) can decide what they’re really denouncing. One school of thought recently has been to add “by zombies” to any construction to determine if it is passive. But really, calling state-of-being expressions passive is itself creating zombies, and we all know zombies don’t exist.