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48
One of the characteristic features of English is that verbs which were originally intransitive may function as
transitive verbs without changing their morphological structure, with or without changing their lexical meaning.
They ran the distance in five minutes.
Frank will run your house.
James stood the lamp on the table.
2. The active voice of intransitive verbs shows that the action, directed from the subject, does not pass over
to any object, and thus the verb only characterizes the subject as the doer of the action.
He came here yesterday.
The boy can run very fast.
You acted wisely.
He slept eight hours.
3. The form of the active voice of some transitive verbs, often accompanied by an adverbial modifier, does
not indicate that the subject denotes the doer of the action. This specific use of the transitive verb is easily
recognized from the meaning of the subject, which is a noun denoting a non-person, and by the absence of a
direct object after a monotransitive, non-prepositional verb. In such cases the verb is used in the medial voice.
The bell rang.
The door opened.
The newspaper sells well.
The novel reads easily.
Glass breaks easily.
The place was filling up.
It said on the radio (in the article) that the weather forecast is favourable.
The passive voice
The use of tense, aspect and perfect forms in the passive voice
§ 67. As seen from table II, verbs in the passive voice may acquire almost all the aspect, tense and perfect
forms that occur in the active voice, except for the future continuous and perfect continuous forms.
The examples below illustrate the use of the passive voice in different aspect, tense and perfect forms.
Common aspect, non-perfect
Students are examined twice a year.
They were examined in June.
They will be examined next Friday.
Continuous aspect, non-perfect
Don’t be noisy! Students are being examined.
The students were being examined when the Professor came.
Common aspect, perfect
Our students have already been examined.
They had been examined by 2 o’clock.
Everybody will have been examined by 3 o’clock.
The passive voice of different verbs