Tham khảo tài liệu 'the grammar book teacher course part 52', ngoại ngữ, ngữ pháp tiếng anh phục vụ nhu cầu học tập, nghiên cứu và làm việc hiệu quả | Chapter 18 The Passive Voice 355 than trying to give them rules for omitting the agent in those 85 percent of passives that are agentless. She examined a large number of agents that were overtly expressed in passive sentences occurring in written and spoken discourse and she concluded that almost all these agents could be explained by one of three generalizations. Agented passives arc used 1. When the agent is new information While Jill was walking down the street her purse was snatched by a young man. 2. When the agent is nonhuman . we expect agents to be human All the lights and appliances in the Albertson household are switched on and off daily by this electrical device. 3. When the agent is a well-known personage and should be included as propositional information The Mona Lisa was painted by da Vina. Several issues concerning the use of the passive were researched by Tomlin 1985 . Tomlin investigated the relationship between information structure and clausal grammar by studying ice hockey broadcasts. Here is an excerpt from one sportscast Quick pass ahead to Errol Thompson trying to work past Lapointe it came back to Polonich. Polonich never got the shot away checked by Lapointe. 1985 70 . Confirming what you have seen so far the passive is used in the last clause checked by Lapointe because the subject of this passive clause . Polonich is nonagentive and thematic both in terms of the whole event Polonich as the person with the puck and thus a potential scorer and in terms of Polonich s being a participant in the previous clause. An agented passive is used because the agent Lapointe is new information in the discourse that is the fact that it was Lapointe who did the checking is new information that listeners need to know in order to follow the flow of the game. Conclusion Early transformational grammar accounts and many ESL EFL texts tended to treat the passive voice as if it were a syntactic variant of the active voice. We have attempted to argue .
