Subject of a sentence in passive voice

THE STAR'S MIND OUR ENGLISH Friday September 14, 2007
Hiding behind the passive
By TOM PAYTON
THE passive is a grammatical structure of the form: object + [be] + past participle + [hidden subject].
It has several functions, but one of the main uses is to disguise the cause of an action.
For example:
Your loan has been approved
“Your loan” = object
“has been” = the third person present perfect form of the verb “be”
“approved” = the past participle form of the verb “approve”
We don’t know who approved the loan, or it isn’t specified, or we don’t need to know. The subject, or the “doer” of the action, is hidden.
Of course we can reveal the subject by adding “by + subject” to the sentence stem:
Your loan has been approved by the accounts department
The reasoning behind this is exactly the same reasoning that is used for passives in Bahasa Malaysia.
Take this sentence:
Nombor yang anda dail tidak dapat dihubungi
which translates as
The number you have dialled cannot be reached
In this case, there is simply no need to add the subject as the subject is you! It would sound very odd if you said, “The number you have dialled cannot be reached by you” or “nombor yang anda dail tidak dapat dihubungi oleh anda”.
There are times when we do reveal the subject, though. In this case we use a passive because we want to put the object at the front of the sentence to give it extra importance. For example:
Virgin Atlantic is owned by Richard Branson
We follow the same pattern in BM:
Virgin Atlantic dimiliki oleh Richard Branson
We also need to obscure things with the passive when we don’t want to assign blame or responsibility:
Your application has been rejected
If you send a message like this using the passive, you avoid attaching the action to an individual. Perhaps the person who was rejected isn’t too happy and might go looking for trouble!
Sometimes we are not aware of who performed an action, which also calls for the use of a passive structure:
My car was stolen last night
Obviously, I don’t know who did it – otherwise I would know where to look!
Tom Hayton is a Business Trainer with the Professional Development Unit (PDU), at the British Council Malaysia. The PDU offers a wide range of learning opportunities from management and communication skills training to developing English skills. Visit its website at www.britishcouncil.org.my or e-mail thomas.hayton@britishcouncil.org.my.
After reading the above article, I wish to make the following comments which were initially sent to the Editor of MIND OUR ENGLISH but withdrawn and posted here:-
I refer to the sentence, “Your loan has been approved”, mentioned in the article Hiding behind the passive of MIND OUR ENGLISH dated September 14, 2007.
‘Your loan’ being stated as object therein appears erroneous as the sentence itself will have no subject then and it is not an imperative sentence, the subject for which can be understood.
A sentence is defined as a grammatical unit that is syntactically independent and has a subject that is expressed or, as in imperative sentences, understood and a predicate that contains at least one finite verb (vide American Heritage Dictionary http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sentence).
‘Your loan’ should instead be the subject in the said sentence which is in the passive voice with the doer of the action (if mentioned) being the object of the preposition ‘by’.
Now let me quote below the Definitions of subject from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject_(grammar)):-
Quote
The subject of a sentence is sometimes defined as the argument that generally refers to the origin of the action or the undergoer of the state shown by the predicate. This is a semantic definition. Such a definition is problematic for several reasons. In languages where a passive voice exists, the subject of a passive verb may be the target or result of the action. For example:
John was arrested.
The police arrested John.
In the first sentence (which is in the passive voice), John is the subject, while in the second sentence (active voice) the police is the subject and John is the object.
Unquote