Voice
: voice
In English, Voice=Pass
applies to verbal past participles acting as predicate of a clause to indicate that they reflect passive voice as opposed to the active voice perfect.
The Voice
feature is not used to explicitly mark active voice.
It is expected that a fuller account of voice in English belongs at the clause level rather than the morphological level (but no standard for clause-level features exists yet).
Pass
: passive
Verbal past participle acting as predicate of a clause in the passive voice (as opposed to the active voice perfect).
To break this down:
- Only past participles (PTB tag of
VBN
) tagged as VERB are candidates for this feature. - A word attaching as aux, aux:pass, or cop is not eligible. Words attaching in other functions (whether explicitly clausal in the deprel, e.g. ccomp, xcomp, advcl, acl, or not, e.g. amod) are eligible.
- If the clause has a non-outer subject, it will be of the passive variety: nsubj:pass or csubj:pass. Only
Voice=Pass
verbs may have passive subject dependents. - In most
Voice=Pass
clauses, if the clause has any auxiliaries, one of them is a passive auxiliary: aux:pass. - An agent by-phrase in a passive clause attaches as obl:agent. Only
Voice=Pass
verbs may have obl:agent dependents.
Examples:
- Kennedy was killed.
- He got shot.
- It has been eaten by moths. Moths have eaten the painting. (Note: eaten in the second sentence is NOT an example of
Voice=Pass
because the past participle is triggered by the perfect, not passive.) - paintings eaten by moths
- a ruined sandwich
- Beethoven (born 1770, died 1827)
History:
Before UD v2.13, this feature was restricted to past participles with an explicit aux:pass dependent. For UD v2.13, this was broadened to include all past participles interpreted as passive.
Voice in other languages: [abq] [am] [arr] [bej] [bg] [bor] [ceb] [cs] [el] [eme] [en] [fi] [fr] [gn] [gub] [ha] [hu] [hy] [jaa] [ka] [ky] [myu] [qpm] [qtd] [quc] [ru] [sv] [tl] [tpn] [tr] [tt] [u] [uk] [urb] [urj] [xcl]