Passive Acceptance: The Grammar and Politics of Voice
Geoffrey K. Pullum, FBA - University of Edinburgh
Location: TBC
Time/Date: 24th May 2011, 16:00 - 17:00
AbstractBooks on English usage, writing, and style standardly supply stern warnings against the use of the passive. The consumers of such works meekly accept the advice. Many journalists and other writers have fully internalized the view that the passive is weak, evasive, dull, and even wicked (though of course they then go on unwittingly to use it, as we all do). Where did this nonsense about a perfectly useful and respectable information-packaging construction come from? The prejudice seems to have originated in America, not really taking root in Britain until after World War II. And as so often with prejudice, it is profoundly misinformed. I review a sad cavalcade of inept critics and pontificators who inveigh against the passive but show by their examples that they can't tell what's a passive and what isn't. I also deconstruct the common equation between passive voice and evasiveness about agency. And I offer something that modern linguistics has signally failed to provide: an informal but reasonably accurate description of the 24 different constructions in English that are correctly called passives.
Published: 6th April 2011