Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
38 lines (28 loc) · 2.35 KB

Voice.md

File metadata and controls

38 lines (28 loc) · 2.35 KB
layout title shortdef udver
feature
Voice
voice
2

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.
    • If a clause has an aux auxiliary but no aux:pass auxiliary, it is probably an active perfect clause.
  • 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.