Voice: voice
Voice is a feature of verbs that helps map the traditional syntactic functions, such as subject and object, to semantic roles, such as agent and pacient.
Act: active voice
Prototypically, the subject of the verb is the doer of the action (agent), the object is affected by the action (patient).
All active participles (in present and past form) are tagged Voice=Act.
By default, the finite forms, ininitives and gerunds of non-reflexive verbs are also labeled Voice=Act, except for the cases when they are labeled Voice=Pass and Voice=Mid, see below.
Examples
- мы атаковали врага. “We attacked the enemy”
Pass: passive voice
The subject of the verb is affected by the action (patient). The doer (agent) is either a non-obligatory oblique phrase of the verb or not overtly expressed;.
The passive participles (in present and past form) are tagged Voice=Pass. The finite non-reflexive forms are labeled Voice=Pass in the passive construction; in this case, the form is marked with -sja (but the lemma is tagged as non-reflexive).
Examples
- Мы были атакованы врагом. “We were attacked by the enemy”
- Разработки лекарства ведутся несколькими международными компаниями. “Drug development is conducted by several international companies”
Mid: middle voice
Between active and passive, needed for the reflexive verbs (in all forms except active participle).
Examples
- Я занялся музыкой. “I took up.Refl music”
References
Anna Siewierska. 2013. Passive Constructions. In: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (http://wals.info/chapter/107)
Voice in other languages: [abq] [am] [arr] [bej] [bg] [ceb] [cs] [el] [eme] [en] [fi] [fr] [gn] [gub] [hu] [hy] [jaa] [ka] [ky] [myu] [qpm] [qtd] [quc] [ru] [sv] [tl] [tpn] [tr] [tt] [u] [uk] [urb] [urj] [xcl]