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A passive construction is preferable in case when the speaker is interested in what happens to the person or
thing denoted by the subject. The verb or the whole verb phrase is thus made more prominent. The agent or the
source of the action is not mentioned at all, either because it is unknown or because it is of no particular
importance in the utterance, or else it is evident from the context or the situation. The predicate verb with its
modifiers contains a new and most important item of information and is of great communicative value.
We were brought up together.
I am always being contradicted.
Thank you for your help, but it is no longer required.
You will be met as you leave the airport, and you will be given another ticket.
In silence the soup was finished - excellent, if a little thick; and fish was brought. In silence it was
handed.
There are a number of conventional expressions where the passive voice is constantly used.
The novel was published in 1929.
Shakespeare was born in 1564.
The use of the agentive by-object
§ 72. The use of the agentive by-object is highly restricted, it occurs in one case out of five, and even less
frequently in colloquial speech and imaginative prose. However, when it does occur, the by-object is of great
communicative value, and its elimination would often make the meaning of the verb incomplete and the
sentence devoid of meaning.
The agent may be a living being, or any thing or notion that can be the source of the action.
The whole scene was being enacted by puppets.
In some areas the picture has been barely touched by the brush.
I was wounded by a landmine.
The distant mountain had been formed by fire and water.
How much was she influenced by that fake idea?
Besides a noun and very rarely a pronoun, a by-object may be a gerundial phrase or complex, or a
subordinate clause.
I was then awakened only by knocking on the window and Annie telling the person responsible to go off.
She didn’t really know anything about people, she was always being taken in by what they told her.
Owing to its communicative value and the final position in the sentence, the by-object may be expanded, if
necessary, to an extent that is hardly possible in the subject group, as in this commentary on Cezanne's painting:
“The Card Players.” The subject of this painting of two peasants playing cards was probably inspired by a
similar composition by one of the brothers de Pack, French painters of the seventeenth century whose work
Cezanne admired.
The category of mood
§ 73. The meaning of this category is the attitude of the speaker or writer towards the content of the
sentence, whether the speaker considers the action real, unreal, desirable, necessary, etc. It is expressed in the
form of the verb.
There are three moods in English - the indicative mood, the imperative mood and the subjunctive mood.
The indicative mood
§ 74. The indicative mood form shows that what is said must be regarded as a fact, as something which has
occurred or is occurring at the moment of speaking or will occur in the future. It may denote actions with