thread: 2011-02-07 : Grammatical Voices
On 2011-02-07, edheil wrote:
Passive voice is also used to foreground, declare as the topic, or focus attention on, an element of the sentence that happens to be the patient rather than the agent of an action.
See what I did there? The users of passive voice are not the topic, the foreground, the focus of my attention, despite being agents. The passive voice itself is the topic, foreground, focus of my attention, despite being a patient. That's why the passive voice is the correct way to form that sentence.
I'd argue that "passive voice is used to..." is a more precise and accurate formulation of the sentence in your original post. The topic is passive voice, the statement about the topic is how people use it; the way to formulate that in English is to topicalize "passive voice" by making it the subject, forcing the verb into the passive voice, and the agent into a "by" prepositional phrase, and the identity of the people who use it is irrelevant enough that we don't need to bother with that.
That being said, habitual focus on patients rather than agents is arguably pathological and confusing, which is why it is the refuge of timid people writing feebly. But there's no reason to let the timid and feeble own it! It's a robust and necessary construction in its own right, just as a defensive stance is a vital fencing move, despite the fact that a frightened fencer might never leave it.
