Passive voice transformation

Voice is a grammatical category of verbs being active or passive. Voice gives information about the roles of different participants (agents or recipients) in an event. In order to form a passive verb phrase, there is added the auxiliary BE in the same tense as the sentence should have followed by past participle of the active verb. Transformation from active to passive voice has the following results: the active subject becomes the passive agent, the active object becomes the passive subject, the preposition ‘by’ is inserted before the agent (optional and commonly omitted).

Direct object as subject (Longman published all these books. -> All these books were published by Longman.)

Indirect object as subject (They bought her a bunch of flowers. -> She was bought a bunch of flowers.)

Ditransitive verbs like bring, give can take two objects so they can produce two passive forms

Tom game me a pen. -> I was given a pen by Tom. A pen was given to me by Tom.

Pseudo-passive have + object + past participle represents the situations when a person is having something done by someone else. (Hillary had her hair cut.)

We keep the butter here.  -> The butter is kept here.

They broke the window.  -> The windows was broken.

Many people have seen it.  -> It have been seen by many people.

They are interviewing him now.  -> He is being interviewed now.

Passive is used for following reasons

1. When the agent is obvious so we do not have to mention him. (The letter was delivered.)

2. The agent is unknown. (The minister was murdered.)

3. We are more interested in the action than the agent. (The house was sold last week.)

4. To avoid responsibility.  (A mistake has been made in calculating.)

5. To produce an objective tone, especially in scientific literature. (A new star has been found.)