D. V. Demidov

5. The peculiarities of voice as a verbal category. 
The opposition of active and passive forms of the verb.
The verbal category of voice shows the direction of the 
process as regards the participants of the situation reflected in the 
syntactic structure of the sentence. Voice is a very specific ve rbal 
category: first, it does not reflect the actual properties of the 
process denoted, but the speaker‘s appraisal of it; the speaker 
chooses which of the participants in the situation – the agent (the 
subject, the doer of the action) or the patient (the object, the 
receiver of the action) – should be presented as the subject of the 
syntactic construction. Second, though it is expressed through the 
morphological forms of the verb, voice is closely connected with 
the structural organization of the syntactic construction: the use of 
passive or active forms of the verb involves the use of suitable 
syntactic construction. 
The category of voice is expressed by the opposition of the 
passive and active forms of the verb; the active form of the verb is 
the unmarked, weak member of the opposition, and the passive is 
the strong member marked by the combination of the auxiliary 
verb to be and participle II of the notional verb. It denotes the 
action received or a state experienced by the referent of the 
subject; in other words, the syntactic subject of the sentence 
denotes the patient of the action in the situation described, while 
the syntactic object, if any, denotes the doer of the action, e.g.: 
The cup was broken by his daughter. Passive constructions are 
used when the agent is unknown or irrelevant, e.g.: He was killed 
during the war. 
Besides passive and active constructions, there are also the 
so-called “medial” voice types, whose status is problematic: 

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semantically, they are neither strictly passive nor active, though the 
verb used is formally active. There are three ―medial‖ voice types 
distinguished in English: ―reflexive‖, ―reciprocal‖, and ―middle‖. In 
reflexive constructions the subject of the action is the object of the 
action at the same time, e.g.: He dressed quickly. This meaning can 
be rendered explicitly by the reflexive ―-self‖ pronouns, e.g.: He 
dressed himself. In reciprocal constructions the subject of the action 
is its object at the same time, e.g.: They quarreled. This meaning 
can be rendered explicitly with the help of the reciprocal pronouns 
one another, each other, with one another, e.g.: They quarreled with 
each other. In middle constructions the subject combined with the 
otherwise transitive verb is neither the doer of the action nor its 
immediate object, the action is as if of its own accord, e.g.: The 
door opened; The concert began.