The voice category, being one of the main verbal categories in a language, is traditionally considered to be discrete. It means that if there are two voice forms (active and passive) in a language, a verbal form may belong either to the active or to the passive voice; if there are three kinds of voice forms (active, passive and medium), then a verbal form may belong to one of these three. There...

Two experiments investigated whether 4- and 5-year-old children choose to learn from informants who use more complex syntax (passive voice) over informants using more simple syntax (active voice). In Experiment 1 (N = 30), children viewed one informant who consistently used the passive voice and another who used active voice. When learning novel words from the two informants, children were more...

In English, transitive events can be described in various ways. The main possibilities are active-voice and passive-voice, which are assumed to have distinct semantic and pragmatic functions. Within the passive, there are two further options, namely be-passive or get-passive. While these two forms are generally understood to differ, there is little agreement on precisely how and why. The passiv...

only two voices have been represented in italian grammar. if we look at the passive constructions from a pragmatic point of view, it can be seen as a language strategy being classified as an event. this change of perspective creates different structures. in this article we shall study a speaker’s change of perspective in attention to the valence theory. according to this theory, a verb on the b...

Our research is motivated by the observation that NLP systems frequently mislabel passive voice verb phrases as being in the active voice when there is no auxiliary verb (e.g., “The man arrested had a long record”). These errors directly impact thematic role recognition and NLP applications that depend on it. We present a learned classifier that can accurately identify reduced passive voice con...