Defining "passive" In the field of linguistics, the term passive is applied to a wide range of grammatical structures. Linguists therefore find it difficult to define the term in a way that makes sense across all human languages. The canonical passive in European languages has the following properties: The subject is not an agent. There is a change in: word order; or in nominal morphology—the form of the nouns in the sentence. There is specific verbal morphology—a particular form of the verb indicates passive voice. The problem arises with non-European languages. Many constructions in these languages share at least one property with the canonical European passive, but not all. While it seems justified to call these constructions passive when comparing them to European languages' passive constructions, as a whole the passives of the world's languages do not share a single common feature.
Defining "passive" In the field of linguistics, the term passive is applied to a wide range of grammatical structures. Linguists therefore find it difficult to define the term in a way that makes sense across all human languages. The canonical passive in European languages has the following properties: The subject is not an agent. There is a change in: word order; or in nominal morphology—the form of the nouns in the sentence. There is specific verbal morphology—a particular form of the verb indicates passive voice. The problem arises with non-European languages. Many constructions in these languages share at least one property with the canonical European passive, but not all. While it seems justified to call these constructions passive when comparing them to European languages' passive constructions, as a whole the passives of the world's languages do not share a single common feature.