Passivisation

Jūratė Ruzaitė, Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania
jurate.ruzaite@vdu.lt

Passivisation is a grammatical process in which the syntactic structure of an active sentence is rearranged so that the subject of the active sentence becomes the object of the passive sentence, e.g. when passivised, the active sentence ‘The cat chased the dog.’ is restructured into ‘The dog was chased by the cat.’ or the agentless form ‘The dog was chased.’. This structure is used to emphasise the recipient of the action (‘the dog’) rather than the doer of the action (‘the cat’).

Critical discourse analysts have suggested that passivisation (along with nominalisation) serves important ideological functions, such as deleting agency (especially by omitting the agents of negative actions), de-emphasising the doer of the action, emphasising the object or recipient of the action, expressing detachment, and diffusing responsibility (especially when used by powerful groups to shape or influence opinion climates). This category is especially important when analysing linguistic presentation of groups and their activities, especially concerning the questions of guilt or innocence. Analysis of syntactic aspects (including active versus passive sentences, among others) is also of special importance when examining negative out-group descriptions in public space.

Passivisation has recently become a subject of research in Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly in the study of how neural language models acquire and process syntactic rules. NLP research explores the ability of language models to learn exceptions to syntactic rules, focusing on restrictions in English passivisation. Studies show that neural network-based language models can learn passive constraints similar to those observed in human language processing, suggesting that evidence for these exceptions is available in linguistic input. This highlights the potential of computational models to simulate human-like syntactic learning and provides insights into the mechanisms underlying language acquisition.

Keywords: agency deletion, critical discourse analysis, passive voice, syntactic structure

Related Entries: Critical Discourse Analysis, Ideology

References:
Fowler, R., Hodge, B., Kress, G., & Trew, T. (1979). Language and control. Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Leong, C. S.-Y., & Linzen, T. (2023). Language models can learn exceptions to syntactic rules. https://doi.org/10.7275/h25z-0y75
Leong, C. S.-Y., & Linzen, T. (2024). Testing learning hypotheses using neural networks by manipulating learning data (arXiv:2407.04593). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2407.04593
Reisigl, M., & Wodak, R. (2001). Discourse and discrimination: Rhetorics of racism and antisemitism. Routledge.