English Teachers Get This Wrong About English (a Pedantic Response to
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- Опубліковано 11 тра 2024
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This is a video about the subject IN ENGLISH. It applies to some other languages, but not others.
Thanks to my patrons!!
Patreon: www.patreon.com/user?u=73482298
Sources:
Arcus, D. (2019). "The Passive Voice Has No Place In Conversations About Rape". WBUR.
Henley, N., Miller, M., & Beazley, J. (1995). "Syntax, Semantics, and Sexual Violence: Agency and the Passive Voice". Journal of Language and Social Psychology.
Zoe Bee. (2022). "What's the Deal with Passive Voice?". UA-cam. Available from • What's the Deal with P...
Chapters:
0:00 - Intro
2:08 - What the Subject Actually Is
3:23 - Side Note
5:00 - Credits
Written and created by me
Art by kvd102
Music by me.
Translations:
Leeuwe van den Heuvel - Dutch
Дзишу Фурыч - Russian
#linguistics #englishgrammar
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Hope you enjoyed hearing me complain about my old English teacher.
*does a sponsorship from established titles*
"I'm sorry guys, I'll vet my sponsors better in future!"
*next video*
"So, VPNs are a great way to protect your data..."
Don't take vpn sponsorships in the future, please, the way you are advertising them is incredibly misleading, I know it's just a script but you shouldn't take a corporation's word for this.
tbf vpn ad scripts got a lot better - the only part that’s misleading is the concealing your tracks/public wifi one, no? everything else is true
"here, the subject is the verb, in this clause, the subject is whatever the verb agrees with and in this full sentence the subject is this" is an amazingly confusing sentence without context, i love it
I thought it was confusing even with context…😅
It is confusingly perfect!
Yes, yes, yes, I do see that there is a real dilemma here. In that, while it has been government policy to regard policy as a responsibility of Ministers and administration as a responsibility of Officials, the questions of administrative policy can cause confusion between the policy of administration and the administration of policy, especially when responsibility for the administration of the policy of administration conflicts, or overlaps with, responsibility for the policy of the administration of policy.
@@Salsmachev … say what now?
I had to rewind it several times but yes! It checks out!
Opinion: the impersonality of "The woman was raped by someone" is more easily explained what's happening to the agent. In the active voice, both the agent and the patient are obligatory arguments. In the passive, the agent is dropped and then reintroduced in a prepositional phrase, as an adjunct. Adjuncts are not obligatory, so we interpret it sort of as additional information. And you end up with a reading where the rapist's role is deemphasised
good theory
You can see this even in which words are stressed in each sentence. "The woman was RAPED by someone" "SOMEONE raped the woman", the importance of the perpetrator to the sentence is literally audible
kal aasi real !!
@@YouYou-ir4zu i exist
kala Asi fron ma poga 😮
hell yeah get those english teachers!! I once had an english teacher who used to say nonsense like "a is short for alpha, b for beta and so on" and "you can't say that you're watching a film if it was shot on a digital camera" and ever since then linguists calling out misinformed english teachers makes my heart happy
C is short for "See? I'm making this all up."
They also would have accepted "Camma."
My German teacher in elementary told me a syllable has to include a consonant...
What Latin letter did she think was short for theta? And how did she explain 24 letters vs 26 letters?
Well, technically she was right to correct you. You almost never watch the litteral film(unless you are a movie major), you watch the movie projected through the film on a screen.
@@user-zn4pw5nk2v here in Australia (and I assume in other dialects of English as well) "film" can be a straight up synonym of "movie". If you talk to someone who says "we watched a really good film last night" you understand that they are talking about a movie and not the physical film reel. My English teacher was wrong
"The subject is the doer of the verb"
Languages with quirky subjects: Allow me to introduce myself
The 1/4 of languages that are ergative-absolutive: Allow us to introduce ourselves.
Hindi be like: Yes the agent is nominative, unless it is perfect in which case it is ergative. But only for some verbs and for others the agent is in the dative in all tenses but then with some light verbs it does not become ergative but for other light verbs...
Hindi motherfuckers are unable to choose what case the agent should be in
Honestly Im not even sure how to translate this to my language, hmm...
Experimentation:
Sunis ar muti noķēra bumbu.
Bumba tika noķerta suņa mutē.
Ar muti sunis noķēra bumbu.
Bumbu ar muti noķēra sunis.
Suņa mute noķēra bumbu.
Suņa mutē tika noķerta bumba.
...
yea my only conclusion is that indeed, my language is not analitical sintax doesnt matter only conjugation does. Still have no idea if my language has passive voice or not.
And then you have Polish, where genitive subjects are a thing sometimes, just because we want our negations to sound differently.
@@maciejszulc2684 don't you mean genitive objects? I'm not sure what you mean by "genitive subjects" but negation changes the object to genitive, not the subject.
As an Italian who studied Italian grammar (on top of Latin, English and German grammar), i noticed that in zoe bee's video and I was wondering whether she had made a mistake, the meaning of subject and object is different in English or it was taught like that for practical or historical reasons. Thanks for clearing this up.
I think the more complex verb conjugation of romanic languages makes it easier to spot the subject for us. I remember teachers warned us frequently about this mistake in high school.
@@Smonserratm yeah definitely
I think we get confused because we describe English grammar using terms designed to explain Latin. This is particularly noticeable in discussions around aspect and mood. You may have noticed that English doesn't really have a future tense, although we constantly talk as if it does - we actually use modal auxiliary verbs to specify intention in the present. The historical reason is classical education, students were obliged to learn Latin before any other language.
@@timflatus Terms designed to explain Latin explain not only Latin. They are universal, despite some language have no some features or have additional ones. After your comment I don't know whether my native Russian has a future tense. Because it is done by the auxiliary verb "буду/будешь/будет/будем/будете/будут" (~=shall/will) for imperfect verbs, and for perfect verbs it is conjugated like present one. Some languages have more than one future tense for one verb.
I sometimes mixed aspect and mood. Now I know that aspect is "залог" (whether the object is the agent or patient), and mood is "наклонение" (does the sentence tell, or command, or define condition).
@@user-bi4eo3ys1f I understand that these terms are supposed to be universal, but few English speakers understand what "subjunctive" or "imperfect" mean. Surely one doesn't need a degree in linguistics to understand the grammar of one's own language?
I'm the English teacher that gets this right! I always bring up this distinction in my ENG101 to show clearer the difference between passive and active.
I thought you were going to mention the "exonerative voice", where journalists use the passive voice (among other careful use of language) when talking about police violence in a way that de-emphasizes the agency of the perpetrators of state violence.
YES very similar and equally important to mention……… with equally dangerous implications………
also similar to ideas i have heard which i think make a lot of sense which put forward that it is harmful to say things like “he was shot because he was black” or “she isn’t respected since she is a woman” since it puts the blame on the patient, and instead to say “he was shot because the shooter was a racist” or “she isn’t respected due to her coworkers’ misogyny. not entirely the same thing but feels relevant
My first thought was "How do people get this wrong?", and then I remembered that English speakers don't know about cases. In German for example it's super easy to tell which one's the subject and which one's the object.
But even in English it should be fairly easy, as I can leave out the object from a sentence, but a subject is mandatory (hence why we say "It rains", even though the "it" doesn't really refer to anything).
This also applies to these passive sentences. I can say "The ball was caught" and leave out the agent and it still makes grammatical sense. But when I say "... was caught by the dog" it doesn't make sense anymore.
Yeah, my first instinct was also "well, that's easy, the subject is in the nominative"...
And then I remembered my own native language (Polish) allows genitive subjects sometimes.
@@maciejszulc2684 Genitive subjects? Now that's the first time I ever heard of this. I guess I have something to research now haha
@@playtypus4592 Basically Polish negations of the verb "to be" are weird. The sentence "A cat is in the garden" translates word-to-word into "Kot jest w ogrodzie" and it works just fine.
But "A cat is not in the garden" changes into "Nie ma kota w ogrodzie" - literally "--- doesn't have a cat in the garden" with no words in the nominative and a cat in the genitive. In Polish grammar we call this a "logical subject" as the cat is the owner of "not being in the garden", it just happens to be expressed this way in the language.
(I've placed "---" where English demands a typical subject, but Polish is just fine with nothing there).
We also have can form sentences without a subject altogether, as in "Zabrano kota z ogrodu" ("--- took the cat from the garden").
@@maciejszulc2684 That's super interesting! Thanks for the example. I basically have no idea about how Slavic languages work in general and Polish specifically. English and German both being Germanic languages sort of work on similar assumptions most of the time. Although there are occasionally differences too. But one core similarity is that there cannot be a sentence without a subject. So not just in English do we need a dummy subject even if there is nothing to refer to ("It rains"), but in German too ("Es regnet").
I'm sure there are also other features present in both English and German that are kind of weird from the perspective of a non-native speaker. But right now I can't think of any. Perhaps the weirdest is the concept of switching the word order around when asking a question with the question word at the beginning. At least in all the other languages that I learned or dabbled in so far this isn't done at all
@@playtypus4592 hey i just wanted to let you know that your original post was by far the clearest explanation of subject v object ive seen :D good stuff mr. monotreme!
This agent/patient vs subject/object distinction is all the more important because passive voice isn't the only way to get a patient subject.
See patientive ambitransitive verbs like "to burn", "to break" or "to melt":
"The arsonist burnes the house" → "The house is burning"
"He broke the window" → "The window broke"
"The sun will metl the snowman→ "The snowman will melt"
There is also Pseudo-reflexivity in Romance languages:
"Ce vin se boit frais" = "This wine must be drunk cool"
"Les voitures se vendent bien" = "Cars are selling well"
(My native language is French).
cette voix me fait toujours rire je sais pas pourquoi 😭 comment on dit patientive ambitransitive en français ?
Lol, I just realized we have this pseudo-reflexivity in German, too.
"Wein trinkt sich am besten kalt" (even though using the passive voice and saying "Wein wird am besten kalt getrunken" would be the more common way to phrase it)
"Die Autos verkaufen sich gut"
I made a comment about this too, before I saw yours! I think it's called ergative case versus absolutive case.
Note that you may even have active sentences where the subject is the patient _and_ there is also an explicit agent which is the _object_ of the verb: e.g. "I caught the flu", "My grandmother will undergo a surgical operation". Also, in French: "L'arbre a pris la foudre", "Le soldat a reçu une balle dans la cuisse", "Le Québec subit actuellement une canicule exceptionnelle", ... So it is definitely not true in general that the active voice is when the subject is the agent and the object is the patient.
@soldyesis7699 I’m confused as to how those are passive voice examples. The subject looks like the agent to me? Would you mind explaining; a little dumb, haha!
“the subject is the word or phrase which controls the verb” THANK YOU! the “doer” definition has bothered me for so long.
It really depends on how you define the action. The ball may be the patient of the dog's catching, but it is the agent of being caught. It is both subject and agent of "to be", but patient of "to catch".
Who is catching? The dog *catches* -agent
Who is being caught? The ball *is* caught -agent
Sometimes a subject is the thing doing the verb though so its not wrong
can someone actually explain why this is a problem, like what's actually wrong with it
@@RazvanMaioru It rains. What's "it"? Absolutely nothing! semantically, 'it' is completely unnecessary, but it is syntactically necessary because English is an obligatory-subject language-- it requires for there to be a noun that the verb agrees with. 'It' isn't a 'doer'. 'It' doesn't DO anything. 'It' doesn't even exist.
This hits weird for me as an autistic person. When presented with the two sentences "the woman was raped by someone" and "someone raped the woman", I thought "those just mean the same thing. Do neurotypicals actually respond differently to things like that?" So on the one hand, I was like "it's nice to be immune to stupid word games like that." But on the other hand, it makes me wonder "how many times have I accidentally played dangerous word games like that on other people?"
And then, of course, I get to wondering if I'm _really_ unaffected or if I'm just being self-righteous, because I'm sure at least a few of the neurotypical men in those studies said those same things while their subconscious biases took the wheel... I think I need some air.
Well... to be fair, I'm not sure how big this effect really is. While I can't access the full study he linked without paying, it's more than 30 years old by now, and from what I can read, it's got a sample size of only 54 people.
The active sentence is definitely more emotionally charged-in English, at least; in my native language, German, I can't say I see much difference-, but it may be questionable whether there is a serious effect on people's judgement due to the reasons mentioned above.
In general, neurotypicals think they are unaffected by these sorts of wording and priming effects, if you directly ask them. You have to explicitly measure it somehow. But then that gets into the other problem, which is that this is exactly the sort of study that appears at the heart of the replication crisis. I don't know whether this particular study was successfully replicated, but many studies with similar subject matter were not replicable.
K Klein becomes Makoto Naegi, part 3
?
@@entitylockington Makoto Naegi is the protagonist of a video game called Danganronpa, in which some students work together to solve murders. He's known for dramatically rebuking false claims with catchphrases like "No, that's wrong!". K Klein has made a couple of videos rebuking false claims in the past. I assume that that's the connection here.
The distinction between semantic role and role in the syntax/case is very important in German. There are verbs that don't demand a phrase with the role of an agens (like "wachsen" ("grow")). "Die Bäume wachsen" ("The trees grow") doesn't have a doer, an agens, even tho it's modus is active. But "Die Bäume" still gets the case that is usually given to the agens, the nominative, which marks it as the subject of that clause, because based on the rules of German grammar (Burzios generalization) a verb can only assign an accusative case to a phrase if it can also assign a semantic role to an agens (which it can't in that example). But based on another rule a noun phrase has to have a case in German. "Die Bäume" will then be assigned the nominative instead of the accusative.
The nominative is assigned by the category I by either moving to it's specifier position or by being linked to it(a sentence consists of the verbal phrase (VP), the inflection phrase (IP) and the final sentence, the clause phrase (CP). The core of the IP, I, consists of the conjugated form of the verb and assigns the nominativ to the position of the subject, it's specifier (X-Bar theory)).
So "Die Bäume" is a patiens in terms of semantic (it has the semantic role that is usually assigned to the accusative object), but takes the role of a subject. That leads to some interesting distinctions between verbs like "wachsen" (non-accusative verbs) and normal transitive verbs with an agens and patiens (like "kaufen" ("buy"): Someone buys something), e.g. it's not possible to use the first group in passive mode ("Die Bäume werden gewachsen" ("The trees are grown") is not a grammatically correct sentence in German), while the first can ("Das Buch wird gekauft" ("The book is bought")) and the perfect of the first group is build with a form of the verb "sein" ("be") ("Die Bäume sind gewachsen" ("The trees have grown")) while the perfect of the second group is build with "haben" ("have") ("Ich habe das Buch gekauft" ("I've bought the book")).
i love finding out new stuff about my native language. i had never put any thought in the difference between the perfect with "sein" and the perfect with "haben", but this makes so much sense!
These unaccusative verbs such as “to grow”, “to fall”, etc. also form a special category in English. A remarkable property of them is that their past participles can be used as adjectives to describe their subjects, as if they were the objects of active transitive verbs. For example: a man who has grown is a grown man, a leaf that has fallen is a fallen leaf. You can’t do that with most intransitive verbs: a woman who has laughed is not a “laughed woman”.
Some non-accusative verbs can form a passive though, eg tanzen and sprechen. As in: 'Hier wird oft getanzt' (Here, dances often take place) or 'darüber wurde nie gesprochen' (people/you/one would never / never used to talk about that)
I wonder what whacky grammar thing is happening there.
Are you sure about the connection with the auxiliary? As far as I know, "sein" goes with dynamic verbs (movement) and "haben" with static verbs (no movement). E. g.: "Ich bin gerannt." ("I have run."), "Ich habe geschlafen." ("I have slept.") or "Die Blume hat geduftet." ("The flower has smelled nice.")
I'm learning English as a foreign language, and our textbook actually uses semantic terms when speaking about the passive voice. This video really helped me understand why it did so.
In my second language, Japanese, subjects and objects are marked with specific articles like は, が and を, and passive sentences use the same word order while only changing the verb, so regardless of whether a sentence is passive or active it's pretty unambiguous which word is the subject of the sentence. It's also possible to omit subject and/or object in both an active or passive sentence.
2:18 but there are languages where the verb agrees with both the subject and an object (e.g. Swahili, Georgian) or even some where only the object is marked (I wanna say Hindi does it sometimes? I can't find it right now though) so this definition, while it may work for English, won't work for all languages
Now for one of my pet peeves. English speaking linguists equating/mixing "verb" with "predicate". Verb is a type of word like noun and adverb, while predicate is a function in a sentence like subject and object. I think that when English speakers use "verb" in the context of functions, what they really want to say is "verbal predicate". There also exist "nominal predicates" which are usually made of the copula followed by a noun phrase.
E.g. In the sentence "This car is blue", "this car" is the subject, and "is blue" is the predicate.
I'm not sure if this is due to different linguistic traditions, or just a common mistake.
@@gregoryford2532The verb phrase tend to include the objects and most adverbials, but the predicate never includes them as far as I know.
I don’t think the copula is part of the predicate; I think you’re confusing it with the verb phrase, which doesn’t necessarily overlap with the predicate. Traditionally, at least in Swedish grammar, the copula verb would be considered the predicate in that clause, while the element following it would be the predicative or “filler of the predicate”. Nowadays however, we consider the former predicative to be the actual predicate, but it doesn’t include the copula. It’s also important to understand the difference between form and function in grammar; talking about phrases, like noun phrases or verb phrases, that’s about form, what something is; talking about clause elements like subject, object and predicate is about function. Subjects and objects are usually noun phrases and so on. I’m not a hundred percent sure about the English terminology I should add.
What gets really fun is when you realize how much English prefers active statements doesn't stop at active sentences. In general, English has a strong inclination towards an animate agent. When you look at verbs in languages like Spanish, Russian, or to a greater extent, Japanese, you'll notice that compared to them, English almost always prefers to express inanimate themes as being acted upon by animate rhemes. Take verbs like "to like" or "to have" and you'll see that a good portion of languages, dare I say most of them, actually prefer less active constructions to express the same idea.
In English, an animate agent likes an [in]animate patient, and almost always the agent is the subject and the patient is the object. In Spanish, the [in]animate agent pleases the animate patient (A mí me gusta la cosa). And Japanese takes it so far that we can't even properly express the same grammar in English. In これが好きだ (this SUBJ liked-thing COP), the [in]animate agent is identified as a likeable.
In English, the animate agent has the [in]animate patient. In Russian, an [in]animate agent exists at a possessor declined into the genitive. In Japanese, at least for the basic possessive, an animate topic is introduced or implied and then the rheme states that an [in]animate agent exists. Literally, "I have a ball" is "(As for me,) A ball exists."
Less so in European languages, but in Japanese there's usually an intransitive verb for every transitive verb. For the most part, these can't even be translated into English without us having to resort to using a passive construction, because English almost always forbids an inanimate thing from being the subject or agent of an action verb. In Japanese? This is fine, and both transitive and intransitive constructions are used at roughly equal rates depending on the focus of the sentence. For instance, if you want to say "I found a wallet", you could say (僕が)財布を見つけた (me SUBJ wallet OBJ find-TR-PST), or you could just as easily (and often will) say 瓶が見つかった (wallet SUBJ find-NTR-PST). And if you wanted to express that sentence in English, you couldn't say "The wallet found", you would have to say "The wallet _was_ found (by an animate agent)".
It's honestly incredible how much languages can differ in their interpretations of how things behave and interact. I love this shit!
You can't say "the wallet found" because "to find" is a transitive verb and needs a patient. "The wallet found someone" is a perfectly valid sentence, even though the inanimate wallet is the subject and agent. For the same meaning, you could have "someone was found by the wallet", but "someone found" would still be incomplete.
It has nothing to do with animacy, or passive voice, just that transitive verbs always require a patient. Passive makes the agent optional, but the patient is still required.
@Răzvan Maioru I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. I used "find" in "the wallet found" as a placeholder for a verb meaning 見つかる. Also, while you _can_ say "the wallet found someone", that implies the wallet has animacy because a wallet cannot find someone unless it does, by definition of something being animate. My point is that English requires an animate agent to transitively act on a patient, an inanimate agent cannot intransitively act in English. But in Japanese, it can and very often does.
@@RazvanMaioru just to second OP's point;
by saying the "wallet found someone", youre /personifying/ a wallet, making it animate. I assume that personification isnt as much of a thing in japanese, then, because inanimate objects dont need to be considered animate in order to do animate things, like dance or wave?
@@3u-n3ma_r1-c0 I mean, a wallet still would need to be personified in order to dance or wave, because those imply volition, but a wallet doesn't need to be personified to do the act of being found or the act of being shut, which can be expressed by active verbs in Japanese, unlike in English where we need to use passive constructions.
Actually, you could express it as "The wallet found" in English, but you would have to have the right cadence and context. In writing it would be expressed as "The wallet, found" or even "The wallet? Found"
Honestly after thinking over it. The whole obscene example I believe is meant to provide a sense of urgency.
Multiple whodunnits over the subjects of a sentence don't always matter. Sometimes the overall message takes priority over the subject(s)
I think the sentence proposed can change how its prompted on first sight.
Like "the man blanked the women"
poses *"Why the man do it?"*
or alternatively
"the women was blanked by the man"
poses *"How is the women doing?"*
Funny that you mentioned the example of rape/harassment... In French, the usual phrasing is often criticized for going one step further by not only making the woman the subject, but also augmenting her responsibility by making her the agent of a verb: "elle s'est fait violer", literally something like "she got herself raped"
This is really cool. One of my favorite uses of the passive comes from learning Japanese. Japanese uses the passive for a couple of things that we don't use it for in English but one that does work is same subjects. In English, we like to change the subjects of verbs in sentences while Japanese keeps the same subject by or action doer through the passive voice.
Eng: John told me, (that) I can't come.
Jap: I was told by John, (that) I can't come.
My favorite thing about this though it that to me, the way Japanese does a sentence like this sounds fine to me. Since learning this, it is something I think about when writing. Just a little thing I wanted to add because I think the passive voice could be used for more, and sometimes the best way to learn something like that is through another language that takes a different approach to the one that you're used to.
This is actually a reason why I advocate for passive voice in English. If I'm writing an essay about The Odyssey for English class, I want to say "The Odyssey was written by the Greek poet Homer" not "The Greek poet Homer wrote The Odyssey". The passive sentence keeps the focus where it belongs.
strictly speaking Japanese doesn't having what we call grammatical subjects. The は and が particles roughly indicate something that we would translate to English as subjects, but they're not exactly the same. Plus, Japanese's more flexible word order makes the whole active VS passive thing much less big of a deal. Using your example:
active: 来られない (can't come) とジャンは (John + topic marker) 私に (to me) 言った (told)
passive: 来られない (can't come) とジャンに (to/by John) 私は (I + topic marker)言われた
You can freely change the order of the words to emphasize different parts of the clause, no matter which voice you use, which is why passive voice is used a lot more in Japanese than in English.
@@jw-ws8dz you're right. My favorite explanation of Japanese word order is that anything goes so long as the verb finishes last. This is what I was taught as a natural and easy way to use the passive. My instructor did tell us that as we got more comfortable, we would on our own switch things up to sound even more natural.
@@jw-ws8dz if I recall correctly the particle ga is the actual subject particle, but only when you cannot use wa
WA is also the topic marker, which is usually the subject, so it is used as a subject marker as well
If the subject isn't the topic you use the particle ga to mark it, else you'd use wa
Japanese is a topic prominent language, so it tends to shove to the front the topic and somewhere around the verb the focus
This means that Japanese likes having the topic as the subject, but it isn't at the level of Austronesian alignment (in which the topic must always be the subject)
Then Japanese is a head final language, so it prefers having the verb at the end of the sentence
And I completely missed how you tiped out the topic marker and subject marker, silly me
please do not shorten "japanese" to that, it's a racial slur.
Thank you for making this video! I'm an ESL teacher and I majored in Hispanic Literature and Linguistics so whenever I explain to my students what the subject is I always make it clear that subject and verb always agree with each other, however I have made the mistake of still defining the subject as the doer of the action which gets confusing when you think about the "must agree with the verb" part. I think your definition is not only more accurate but less confusing.
This was very clarifying! Thank you!
Just found your channel, I've never been a huge fan of English as a subject but this is very interesting! Thanks for the good videos
i love the overlap of language (grammar/syntax) and social studies/literary interpretation
Learned subject =/= agent the hard way when I dove into ergativity. 😅
The studies you cited in the latter part of the video-well, I'm skeptical. It's one of those examples where the outcome seems "too good to be true" (well, it's outrageously bad in the moral sense, but fits a ridiculously simplistic model of how people respond to linguistic cues suspiciously well). Given the issues psychology (including psycholinguistics) has had with reproducibility, I'd want to see very robust confirmation before I'm willing to trust those results.
@@gregoryford2532 *That* is not the problem there.
For the first time I understand the difference between subject and agent case!
... I'd like to request a video, if I may? I've been trying to make sense of x-bar theory, but every time I look into it, I just end up frustrated and confused. If you're in the same boat I am I totally understand, I figured it couldn't hurt to ask.
Actual ESL teacher here, and I'm pleased to say I did actually change to explaining the passive voice in terms of agents and patients about a year ago, in an attempt to detangle grammar for my adult students. I've also made sure to stress with them to think about why someone would use the passive voice in a particular situation, and whether the speaker (usually in the context of a news headline like yours) is attempting to deflect or distract from something by choosing to use the Pasive voice. Great video
With my little knowledge of the theme first principle, I'd say that you would use the passive voice to turn the object into the topic, something that deemphasizes it but makes it more relevant to the conversation
It's a weird thing to say but that's how it seems to work
wrapping your head around the subject/agent distinction is crucial for understanding different types of morphosyntactic alignment
I think what's interesting about this discussion is that it also makes passive voice easier to explain for languages where the passive does something more complicated than switch the agent and patient around. In Japanese passive sentences, the patient becomes the subject, but the agent becomes the dative. This is because there are some verb forms (potential and causative for example) where the patient is the dative in the active form, but these verb forms are more commonly used in their simpler passive variants, which switch them around. Presumably, because this became the rule for passive variants of these verb forms and these verb forms became most commonly used in their passive variants, this carried over to the plain passive form as well
The percentage of videos about the English language is increasing, and I like it 👍
Percentage? In contrary to what?
@@bananaforscale1283 percentage of videos about the English language compared to the total amount of videos by K klein
Yeah English is so underrepresented, FINALLY someone talks about it 🙄
Why are people getting so pressed over this comment lmao
Would like to quibble for a bit: while the grammatical passive voice (in English) tends to have the patient as the subject, not all (English) passive constructions are in the grammatical passive voice. There are many ways in which a writer can avoid putting the agent in the matrix subject position, and almost all of them lead to a certain sense of passiveness in the resultant reading. The focus on the grammatical passive voice as the sole cause of narrative passivity somewhat misrepresents the core issue with narrative passivity, which is that it seeks to grammatically distance the agent of a particular (verbal or otherwise) event and (often) thus make the agent of a particular event appear less relevant or culpable.
My own awkwardness leads to me using a lot of passive voice when talking about personal experiences that could be described by others as having had sexual assault occur towards me. Active voice is hard with these things. I promise I'm not secretly two Bushes in a trench coat.
So when I was introduced to the concept of nouns in elementary school, I was taught that nouns are things you can touch. I found this definition very confusing, becuase I quickly came up with counterexamples like "knowledge" and "love". After some years I then realised that nouns are not defined semantically, but grammatically. I think it's the same thing as the subject/agent confusion.
Another useful thing about defining subject and object this way is with intransitive verbs. The distinction between unaccusative and unergative is much easier to explain. As in both cases the single argument is the subject but depending on which type of verb the subject is either the patient or the agent, while still being in the English active voice.
I think this is actually the first time I have ever understood this difference between active and passive. Thank you!
I'm kind of intrigued by verbs like "appeal" that are still used in the active voice, but also function like the passive voice in terms of designating the agent as the object, e.g. "This music appeals to me" and in other languages like German or Spanish where verbs of this kind are more common, e.g. "Die Musik gefällt mir" and "Me gusta la música".
"Die Musik gefällt mir" is the correct word order.
@@wnkbp4897 or alternatively "Mir gefällt die Musik"
That relates to the longer comment I wrote about non-accusative verbs in German. "Appeal" demands an argument with medium agentivity (in German this usually correlates with the case dative and includes semantic roles like recipient or observer) and one with low agentivity (patiens, in German usually correlated with the case accusativ) ("Something appeals to someone", "Jemanden gefällt etwas").
Based on Burzios generalization the verb "appeal" can't assign the accusativ to the patiens tho because it doesn't assign the semantic role to any agens, but the nominal phrase of the patiens can't be without a case, so it gets assigned the nominative instead and becomes the subject of that clause even tho it's the patiens (the argument with medium agentivity still gets assigned the dative because Burzios generalization only affects the accusative object).
The interesting thing about German is also that word order is relatively free (at least for the positions outside of the verb), so both comments about your German example are correct. But changing the position of things does impact the meaning to some degree because it changes the pronounciation (in a semantic sentence, not just phonological). The default/unmarked order would be Subject-finite verb-Object, so in this case "Die Musik gefällt mir" ("The music appeals to me"), but if you want to emphasize the "me" you can use "Mir gefällt die Musik" instead.
These structures, which as you said still exist in English, used to be far, far more common than they are now, like in Spanish and German. For example, in Old English, the verbs lician (ancestor of "like") and lystan (ancestor of "lust", though the meaning was not sexual yet as far as I'm aware), both of which meant "like", functioned in a similar way. Lician functioned identically to gefallen in German and gustar in Spanish, i.e. with the experiencer in the dative case and the object of desire in the nominative case, whereas with lystan, the experiencer was in the accusative case and the object was in the genitive case. I like the music = Me licaþ se dream or Mec/me lyst þæs dreames
@@jakevolpe Another Old English example that survives fossilized is “methinks” (mē þyncþ)
Tbf, English teachers often simplify these things for pre uni level students to understand. E.g: at school I was taught that adverbs modify verbs (easier to understand and explain), but studying ling at uni has taught be that they can also modify adjectives, adverbs and whole sentences aswell
In the rape example, to me it seems like the passive voice puts emphasis on the woman, inviting us to empathise with her. Whereas the active voice puts emphasis on the perpetrator, inviting us to condemn them.
well see that might just be because you're a nice person, this is unfortunately not true of the average according to these studies :/
I actually feel that the verb "was" acts as a shorthand for contexualizing that the woman is "affected by said perpetrator".
If "had been" was used instead, that would be a better example. Because then its focus is that it happened. Versus what I said previously
The gravity is not on the action in this case, but on the women's hurt from such an act.
Also making the man the subject takes away from what it really should be about, the woman.
I dunno, am I wrong, you tell me(?)
@@TrifectShow I think it's less about emphasis and more about implied causality for the action taking place. In the first example, the perpetrator raped the woman- he did it to her, full stop. In the second, she 'was raped'- it's left ambiguous by the sentence structure whether the perpetrator was responsible, thus inviting inquiry into what 'actually' caused it.
(cw: discussion of my own experiences of grooming and other horrors as relates to those studies)
This may be influenced by my status as a survivor, but I find it genuinely too horrific to believe that this stuff has a substantial impact on the way people view this stuff. It's so depressing that people consistently pride themselves on superficial markers of 'logic' while actively refusing to see the bigger picture.
However, the gender bias makes sense to me- in a fairly neutral way, which actually helps contextualise why abusive nonmen were frequently more dangerous.
I was in a cycle which caused it to happen over and over again- and what I found, in my horrendous little involuntary science experiment, was that abusive women believed my accounts, but wanted to use the pretext of taking me, in and 'caring' for me, for their own ends. Where they flipped on me, they tended to manipulate my vulnerable state to isolate me- by convincing me important people in my life were the problem, or that I was 'acting out' due to my trauma, when in actuality my fight or flight systems were finally shaking themselves back to life and realising I needed to get out.
Abusive men tended to be a bit more... brutish. They'd either dismiss my accounts, or pretend to believe me and then flip at the drop of a hat. Those who did believe me tended to urge me to 'just get over it' and 'just move on.' The few who pretended to care were using me for my body, and would ghost+disappear in the latter half of the relationship.
From what I've seen and experienced, even though nonmen haven't necessarily been consistently 'nicer,' I could absolutely believe that men as a whole are more inclined to lean on the grammatical/logical/factual integrity of a sentence, without absorbing the weight of what's being described. I'm at a loss as to how they're not concerned at their own behaviour half the time 😅
@@gaynebula6439 I had a whole response written to this. But I accidently lost it.
I'm saddened that happen. And I'm sorry for being bothersome.
I do struggle with empathy sometimes, but I know that can loom over you throughtout your life.
Cause I'm male I'm always not sure what to say when seeing a women say she had deeper problems with men. I don't want to cause more problems for risking a bad interaction from someone that has been through that.
But to sum up what I wrote, is that I feel the sentence example doesn't properly convey why the man would be evading responsiblity over how the woman's violently subjected to something by the man.
This video is great! I think it's only pedantic in the sense that the "doer" of the action is actually a simple way to explain the concept of a subject to kids and would apply to the sentences they would get tested on in early primary school. For children, asking them to identify "what is doing the action?" will probably help them identify the subject in sentences in most if not all cases, especially when you are trying to teach them the difference between a subject and an object (Grades 1 to 5 approx.) not the difference between active and passive voice (Grades 6 and up approx.). The problem is that once we get into higher schooling, teachers have internalized this "rule" and often forget to fine-tune their lessons for more advanced grammar: "In Grade 2, you learned that a subject is the doer of the verb, which actually is only the case sometimes. Now it's time to learn when the subject in a sentence isn't the doer of the verb." I fully agree with this video, but my very subjective opinion (ha ha) is that let's give these poor teachers a break and give them plenty of hugs for teaching our children!
Nooo, my Zoe Bee
I need to watch this as soon as I can (like in 30 minutes)
Edit: I watched that video :0 (the one from Zoe Bee)
Edit2: You're right :0 It IS easier that way
Thank you. I created a conlang on this very misapprehension and now realise that I've inadvertently created an ergative-absolutive language. In the end I dealt with passive sentence structure by introducing a 4th person for verbs where the actor is uncertain. I wonder if much of the confusion, apart from not being taught English grammar at school, is the result of us using terms that were developed to explain Latin. Do we have difficulty understanding terms like "subjunctive" and "imperfective" because English deals with unreality and continuity in a fundamentally different way?
"a 4th person for verbs where the actor is uncertain" interestingly enough, Finnish has this same feature!
wow, this was actually really insightful; linguistics remind me, slightly, of how phycology was once treated in that i believe it's value (in terms of how it helps us understand the world) is understated. Language is the (or, i suppose a if we want to be pedantic) core means by which we understand the world around us, we create knowledge via explaining the world to ourselves and others and language is an extremely practical way of doing this. as such - i also believe that there should be more interest in philosophical languages; the type that, if memory serves, a few big names in the philosophy of antiquity were interested in. the thought of having a practical, useable means of communicating ideas in their purest form - almost like the code of the universe - intrigues me. so does the prefix "in". i believe it comes once again from Greece. i remember hearing something about how learning is just recollection, but with basic phycology in mind - this could be interpreted to mean that our subconscious stores info and comes to conclusions then guides the conscious into accepting these principles - & i believe that is what feeling is (mostly) for, explaining nebulous concepts, that is.
practically nothing is a red haring in this sea of possibility that is life. i think the ancients also had that right, they bundled together sciences under the banner of philosophy and realised that they all came together in the patterns that lead to mysticism. i have many more things to say, but the world is nebulous and i can't even get anything resembling a grasp on it...
along with that i would like to preface - err... i suppose postface (& preface symoltainiously)- that this **all** unqualified, untested hypothesis that I've just stitched together from many random things I've heard from sources that now elude me...
also i would like to say that i think we do overidealize antiquity in many ways; slavery was rampant, women were seen as no more than objects, differences were, - in many cultures - seen as plague (even more so than now) and we underestimate the time frame that this innovation took place in because of our own rapid innovations in the modern day.
i also think that philosophy may have been almost as prevalent (if not then as prevalent) in pre history but that, as the name "pre-history" implies - this was all lost to time - or at least it eludes us for now.
i realise that this is all a bit irrelevant to what you were saying, in many ways - however, i just wanted to say what the video brought to mind.
Anyway i need to go do my fucking English homework now - that took like 30 minutes, jesus.
As someone from Poland who knows some german and spanish, I think this thing is much more clear in languages that have different verb conjugations for different persons because like you said, the verb form changes based on the subject, not the agent but the subject just happens to be the agent in most cases
Mandarin’s the same way. You can have a sentence that’s not passive (because there’s a whole grammatical structure for passive) with the action’s receiver at the front of the sentence. In class, my professor labeled this the sentence’s subject.
This explanation of viewing the subject through the lense of "control" does make sense for English, but if we ever try to expand the definition to other languages, there are certain significant issues. For example, Kurmanji Kurdish contains ergativity; i.e., if a verb is transitive and in the past tense, you conjugate the verb with the object, not the subject. An example:
Present tense (with "to see"):
Tu min dibînî.
2ᴘs-ɴᴏᴍ 1ᴘs-ᴀᴄᴄ ᴘʀs-see-2ᴘs
You see me.
Past tense (with "to see"):
Te ez dîtim.
2ᴘs-ᴇʀɢ 1ᴘs-ᴀʙs see-1ᴘs
You saw me.
In the second example, "control" is exhibited on the verb by the first person singular, although the "subject" of the sentence is second person singular.
Esperanto is an accuzative language.
Vi min vidas. = You see me.
Vi vidas min. = You see me.
Vi vidas min. = You see me.
Vi vidis min. = You saw me.
Vi vidos min. = You will see me.
Mi estas vidata de vi. = I am seen by you.
Mi estis vidata de vi. = I was seen by you.
Mi estos vidata de vi. = I shall be seen by you.
Li vidas sin de mi. = He sees himself by me. Where "sin de" ="himself by" is the pseudo-ergative pseudo-preposition. I have changed the pronoun because Esperanto's grammar forbids to use the pronoun "sin" for not 3rd person.
Russian pronoun "себя" and its shortening to the particle "ся"/"сь" works with any person and number.
Вы меня видите. = You see me.
Вы видите меня. = You see me.
Вы видели меня. = You saw me.
Я виден вам. = I am seen to you.
Я был виден вам. = I was seen to you.
Я вижусь вами. =(literally) I see myself by you.
Я виделся вами. =(literally) I saw myself by you.
An interesting point where I feel that this definition of active and passive voice may break down is with labile and unaccusative verbs. When used with the active voice, the subjects of these verbs are arguably semantic patients.
I can think of three interpretations. 1) We should distinguish the "semantic active voice" from the "grammatical active voice". Labile and unaccusative verbs use the grammatical active voice, but are semantically passive. 2) We should consider that in the intransitive case of a labile verb, the semantic meaning of the verb shifts so that its subject becomes the agent. After all, how you assign the semantics of "agent" and "patient" is somewhat arbitrary. 3)
Not a linguist -- not sure if one of these approaches (or another I haven't thought of!) is most widespread in linguistic circles.
I would love to hear what you think about this!
It should be noted that the subject of an active sentence is not necessarily an agent (the verb 'to be' being such a case; causatives might also be seen as an example). As a result, it is not quite correct to say that "a sentence has active voice if the subject is the agent" (although it might be good enough as an explanation for anyone not caring too much about the details).
Standard European passive voices are best described as valency-altering operations where a transitive verb with a primary argument (subject) and a secondary argument (direct object) becomes an intransitive whose primary argument (the new subject) corresponds to the secondary argument of the original verb (the old direct object). That is certainly a mouthful to say and I definitely wouldn't use such a description in an English class for kids, though.
I'd heard "doer of the verb" or similar, but I don't think I really got a handle on things until learning French and verb conjugations, which then made me look at English verb conjugations. The most natural meaning of the subject is the noun phrase that the verb is conjugated against. When breaking things down further, in "The ball is caught by the dog," "caught" isn't really the verb at all. "is" is the verb, conjugated against "the ball." "caught" is functioning more like an _adjective_ that is then made into an adjectival phrase by being joined to a noun phrase "the dog" with the preposition "by."
I should mention that I'm a programmer and like simple and clear parse trees: (the ball, is, (caught, by, the dog)) (not sure how to split articles from their accompanying nouns)
generally, in syntax, unless we're directly examining articles, we prefer to keep them with their noun phrases as single units. this structural analysis, though a good effort, doesn't take into account the optionality of 'by the dog'. if we don't need 'by the dog', it must be a separable unit; it's, in effect, an adverbial phrase in total.
The active is when the agent is the subject and also theme, while the passive is when the patient is the subject and theme. The subject is just your focus in the speach act. This system has emerged because a purely semantic system (such as an active-stative system) not only requires knowledge about what noun forms are expected for a certain verb, but it also requires a special theme marker in addition to the semantic case system. Instead a very simple system emerges where every verb has a "subject" and many verbs have one "direct object". But in order to switch theme (the focus on your mind, which next pronoun is expected to refer to), you need a passive verb variation.
I feel like this very extreme example kind of disproves the point here. I don’t get any sense that either option there changes much, because the content of the thought is so visceral and charged that language ceases to be the focus at all, and even as the finer points of language can shape a lot of how we think/feel, this one just doesn’t land for me. Either way, agent/patient vs. subject/object distinction is helpful
0:00 i love how "stop saying this" is in the right direction
This video is actually very interesting to me because I didn‘t know that anyone defined the subject like that. I‘m from Germany and with the active and passive system in German being virtually the same as in English, and sentences being built very similarly, my English teacher just never really mentioned it and all my German teachers defined it as „the part of the sentence, the predicate refers to“.
Just dropping by to say thanks
makes so much sense. in sámi we use the nominative case for the patient in passive voice. ex.: Jietna gullo. (sound is heard)
Interestingly, this grammar works almost exactly the same and with very similar terminology in Portuguese, but I've never had that a teacher do this type of messup, it was actually pretty heavily emphasized in our grammar classes
I was taught that the subject is the thing that "does" or "is." So in the passive construction, the subject is the thing that "is": the receiver. I was also taught that the passive can be used to leave the doer of an action unspecified (which wouldn't be possible if the doer of the action were forced to be the subject).
All in all, I think my English classes more or less taught the same thing as this video, albeit with different terminology.
Hey kind sir, could you do a video about the steps needed to have a full conversation in English as a non native speaker? I struggle with it almost everyday argn
This would be very useful!
Great video. Only problem is that this is far to complex for students learning English to understand. The “doer” of the action just is easier and simpler of an idea to understand and it gets the point across. And this concept of “doer” of the verb is also what helped me learn Japanese.
Just because it's easy doesn't mean it's correct. That's just a childish mentality.
@@modmaker7617 it has to be explained to children thus that’s why it’s childish. It’s gets the point across fairly well to people who have no knowledge of language.
@@theredknight9314 Why can't you just say that the subject changes the verb and always comes before it in English?
@@Anonymous-df8it because a child isn’t going to understand what that means
@@theredknight9314 Does your child have intellectual disability?!
I'm about to be overly pedantic as well, but this idea of teachers always getting the subject-object distinction in passive wrong is a very English-specific problem. Or to be even clearer, a problem of languages with a minimal case system or just no cases at all.
As a Croatian speaker whose life is currently all about grammar (I'm speedrunning German), I cannot overstate how clear it is what the subject is: it's the word in nominative. Even if an entire clause is tecnically the subject, you can still check by replacing it with "this" and seeing if it's in nominative.
I'm honestly not sure if any of my teachers ever got this wrong.
Still, very interesting to know that teachers mixing this up is common in English class. Keep up the good work!
Yeah, cause in english, the only way to even find out what case anything is, is by replacing it with a pronoun-- and then only specific pronouns, because 'it' for example doesn't change between nominative and accusative.
The second you ever look at languages such as Hindi, Tagalog, Georgian, etc., you see that you have to keep distinctions between thematic (agent/patient) and semantic (subject/object) because of how they all mark verbs (intersections between case government and verb agreement is very strong in most of these). I saw this coming a minute after the video started.
Psst: now explain antipassive verbs. :) You're welcome.
What's an antipassive verb?
In Sanskrit we shift to passive voice to highlight or emphasize the receiver of an action. Which lead to my teacher suggesting us to stop talking in passive voice when talking about our duties. For example, he suggested us to say "I should help the poor" instead of "The poor needs to be helped (by me)."
So, I think, in other languages, or atleast in Sanskrit, the passive voice does not make people think that less harm is done to the victim and less responsibility for the perpetrator.
Before watching: When teaching, I usually explained things just via the acronym SAP - Subject, Agent, Patient.
Subject is the thing that the predicate is matched to and that we can usually say the sentence is "written about". In the active voice, the subject is *also* the agent. In the passive voice, the patient is *also* the subject.
______________
Having watched:
I feel like the 'deemphasizing the agent' function is often overstated in passive sentences. To use the example of "The woman was raped (by someone)," it's not so much drawing attention away from "someone" as putting the emphasis on "the woman".
*Normally, this is choice in putting the agent first (not necessarily, but typically, in active voice) or the patient first is simply for discourse cohesion (or "flow" between sentences), but...* if there is an implication to be made from this choice of voice, it seems like it would be that the import should fall on the person who needs help, not the likes of "Well *someone* did it! It doesn't just happen on its own!" That much is already understood, and emphasizing the damaging act will already, to a culturally normed extent, convey the need for investigation and punitive action; it simply leaves such acts centered around the victim.
What about languages where verbs agree with both subject and object (like many polysynthetic languages), how is the subject defined then?
An interesting linguistic phenomenon occurs at 4:36. You pronounce "biases" as /ˈbɑ͜iəsiːz/ rather than /ˈbɑ͜iəsɪz/. I also often make this "mistake" with certain words and I have heard it a lot, although annoyingly I can't remember with what words. The Wikipedia page for English plurals mentions this occurring with "processes" being pronounced "proceses" (ˈpɹo͜ʊsɪsiːz).
It seems to happen by analogy with "-is" (-ɪs) words becoming "-es" (-iːz) when plural, and maybe also with "-ix/-ex" (-ɪks/-ɛks) words becoming "-ices" (-ɪsiːz).
I'm not sure quite what determines whether it can happen though. "Palaces" for example would never be said "palices".
Although your explanation works in english it is even worse cross linguistically. In some languages the verb doesn't ever change and in others it agrees with more than one argument. There are nominal sentences with subjects but no verb and there are even ergative systems where only intransitive verbs agree with the subject, transitive verbs agree with the object. I don't clame to have a definitive definition either. I believe "subject" is concept understood by its uses.
So your explanation is more accurate but still not quite right. Verb agreement doesn't work as a criterion cross-linguistically, since there are many languages who don't have person marking on the verb at all, and some who have agreement with both subjects and objects. Even in English, agreement is kinda shaky because it really only works for 3rd person singular subjects in the present tense.
You're right to point out that subject and object are grammatical categories rather than semantic ones, but there are usually multiple features associated with subjecthood, and what exactly they are varies from language to language. In English, you have case assignment (only for pronouns; I vs. me, he vs. him and so on), word order (subjects usually come first in an unmarked sentence), relativization (you can drop the relative pronoun in 'the man (that) I saw yesterday' but not in 'the man that saw me yesterday'), and probably a few others I'm forgetting. This makes the definition of subject very contentious, and in fact, some linguistic theories dispense of the term altogether, because they argue that the term just doesn't apply to all languages.
Oh, and to be extra pedantic. On the side of semantic roles, there's not just agents and patients. Some verbs assign other roles. A classic example are verbs like 'like', 'love' and so on. In a sentence like 'John likes pizza', John isn't really performing an action, nor is the pizza really being acted upon. These are the tricky cases where languages differ quite a bit regarding subject/object assignment. While in English, 'John' would be the subject here and 'pizza' the object, in Spanish it's the reverse.
But more importantly, I'm right, and Zoe Bee, your former English teacher and you are wrong, and that's what really matters.
The problem with your active-passive voice distinction here is that not all languages have a subject in their passive voice (but I assume your point here was only meant for English). For example in Finnish there is no subject, the respective subject in English, is the object of the verb conjucated in the passive voice (the case being either accusative or paritive confirms this).
I am drinking water - Minä juon vettä .
Water is being drunk. - Vettä juodaan.
In the latter sentence, no subject is present as the form "juodaan" prevents it. Vettä is the partitive of vesi (water) so you can be sure that water is the object in both sentences in Finnish.
In a way it is almost like a form/type ergativity in an otherwise nominative-accusative language.
You say that the subject is what the verb agrees with, but what about languages which don't mark subject on verbs, or languages that mark both subject and object on verbs? Those are often said to have subjects and objects as well.
Tbh, I feel it’s more useful to have a three-way distinction between verbal arguments. In my head, it’s more useful to label the nouns in transitive sentences as agents and patients as mentioned here, but label the sole argument of intransitive verbs as subjects. This is a more workable terminology outside of the nominative-accusative alignment, as it allows for making it clearer how the nominal case system interacts with the verbs. It also makes transferring understanding the differences in voices between nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive languages easier to understand, just because you have clearer terminology.
Usually the verb agrees with the noun in the nominative case. I think this video is about passive voice which clarifies explicitly and without a doubt who the doer of a verb is while at least in German there might be doubts of that in the active voice.
this is a good video and you are right ab this and i know it is all in good faith but would you mind putting a content warning fro the mentions of rape? that can be really harmful to some ppl who aren’t expecting it :)
My language also differentiate between transitive and intransitive by using 3 types of pronouns (actually 4 if you count posessive pronouns).. And also to determine between topic subject/object or focus subject/object...
Haha. My English teacher never taught me this; she was way too busy.
This sounds good _prima facie,_ but there are at least three problems:
First, deep cases such as _agent,_ _patient,_ and _instrument,_ didn't really gain currency until Chuck Fillmore's word during the 1980s. So they are not present in old grammar books.
Second, _agent_ isn't really a case but a cluster of deep roles.
Third, the subject doesn't always control the verb. Consider the deictic locative, especially in contrast to the deictic existential, like this.
There go the girls, don't they?
There goes Harry,, doesn't he?
* There goes Harry, doesn't there?
There is a Santa Claus, isn't there?
* There is a Santa Claus, isn't he?
Given that Lakoff pretty well describes the deictic existential as the deictic locative with a mental rather than a physical space, I think that controller has to be coupled from subject. Also consider
There's a man on the porch, isn't there?
There's a man on the porch, isn't he?
* There's Harry on the porch, isn't there?
There's Harry on the porch, isn't he?
It’s not an exaggeration to say that I barely learned any grammar from 10 years of US American public school English classes, it wasn’t until I started learning other languages and linguistics. Lots of “oh that’s what’s English is doing???” moments
(1:00) VPN sponsorships are always sketchy to me. They contain lies such as hiding the data you send, like that isn't part of basic https encryption. Plus advertising that you can bypass geoblocking, somehow that feels illegal.
But at least VPN services are legitimate, so it's not a scam. But VPN sponsorships are still sketchy.
Is it illegal?
If you're being pedantic, though, there is no consensus about whether or not agents and patients and are required for passives. In some systems, "The ice was melted by the sun" has a patient and a force, while "The ice was melted by the snow" has a patient and an instrument. The object of a verb like "precede" is arguably unaffected by the verb and a neutral theta role has been proposed; "Sunday precedes Monday." In principle, you could restrict theta-roles to agent and patient based on active/passive alteration, but that would make your analysis in the video beg the question!
The traditional presentation is admittedly thorny and I would like to see progress made on bringing generative linguistics into grammar pedagogy, but academic linguistics does not have its house in order here!
"The ice was melted by the snow" should be "The ice was melted by the stove"!
The way my teacher explained it was a sentence is always has to be S-V-O where if the subject is the doer then it's an active voice and if the object is the doer then it's a passive voice. Less than 5 minutes explaination. 😂
Bruh. That's also wrong as the subject isn't *_defined_* as 'that thing before the verb'. It always is in English, but how hard is it really to say, "The subject changes the verb. The object doesn't. [insert example here]. In English, the sentence structure is SVO."
For example, "Someone r@pe$ the woman" => "People r@pe the woman", but not ("Someone r@pe$ the woman" => "Someone r@pe the women"). Similarly, "The woman is being r@ped by someone" => "The women are being r@ped by someone", but not ("The woman is being r@ped by someone" => "The woman are being r@ped by people")
@@Anonymous-df8it Honestly, I have no idea what you were trying to convey here.
@@lylelaney8270 Which part?
ok, what about "it rains"? or, if you want a transitive example "It's sad that dogs die". these aren't passive, they are active. what is 'it'? 'it' doesn't *do* anything. "that dogs die" isn't a patient. It's very easy to construct sentences which, despite being SVO, active sentences, don't conform to agent/patient roles.
here's a few more examples that complicate the passive side of things:
the general gave the soldier a medal:
the soldier was given a medal by the general
the medal was given to the soldier by the general
now, tell me what roles the general, soldier, and medal all have in these.
@@comradewindowsill4253Quite simple, actually. It rains. "It" here is a referential, and when applied to the SVO structure, it becomes the subject that "does" the rain plus there is no object that indicates it's the doer. The same can be applied to general, medal, and soldier. In that case specifically, there are two objects, which are direct and indirect. To determine which is which requires more explanation, which I do not have the motivation to do, but whichever "object" is the doer, it would still be considered passive. As someone who learns and uses English as a second language, the video just made unnecessary, complicated grammar gymnastics.
Language being a lense trought which we see the world is why my kindred will always speak in our language, it is basis for who we are and what is our purpose.
Interesting, but I really, REALLY don't think there's any such malicious intent in how we use active and passive sentences. When the patient is known and the agent is unknown, we tend to use the passive structure.
Otherwise, yes, we COULD say, X was raped by Y", but from my memory, in this case, we do usually say "Y raped X".
We also use passive in which case the patient is the FOCUS of the sentence, but focus does not necessarily mean assigning responsibility. Staying at the rape example, if we explain the mind state or emotions of the victim, we tend to say "She is afraid of walking alone because she was raped on the way home once"
Yesssss I feel vindicated
Hey you know what, I'm pretty sure I was taught this! I'm German though, so I can't tell you for sure whether it was English or German classes, but "patient" rings a bell in this context.
Then again, I was obviously taught it badly because I wouldn't have been able to produce this information on my own if my life depended on it.
2nd example: the ball is subject, it is doing something, it's being caught
No, its mot dping actuon of being caught cuz igs not balls chpice, ball dont control it, action js something somone do, and control a situation, ball is in the state of being caught whike dog is dping action lf catching the ball
@@nexerkarigum4031 what?
@@Liggliluff someone or something being under an influence of another's action do not doing action
Dang! 1:26 PIA hides your IP address so well it uses ipv4 with more than 4 bytes!
I love a small creator going from nothing to a vpn sponsorship
Okay, while we're on passive voice and pet peeves, people who are against the passive voice are a big one for me. Passive voice is a tool that can lend a subtle shade of meaning or emphasis to a sentence. Knowing whether to use the passive or active voice is a great way to elevate your rhetorical skills. On the other hand, being aware of the passive voice and its effective use can also make us better analytical and critical readers. If we were educated on the passive voice, we would be better armed to see through nasty tricks like the dark example sentence and to question the motives of the speaker.
Ive only attended a basic 101 linguistica course, but isnt the subject defined as the specifier of the Inflection Phrase (IP)? I understand It would be needlessly complicated to start explaining this kind of syntax in such a short video, so maybe you said the same thing in different words, but i'm curious if maybe what my teacher taught me in Uni was obsolete or something
The difficulty with teaching grammar is that children respond much more strongly to semantics than grammar, the actual definitions of grammatical structures are both semantically empty and basically circular. If I defined the subject the way you suggest, it would actually be very little help to my Latin students, because I have to tell them what a "subject" of the verb in order to explain what agreement is. Now, in fact "agreement" and "the subject" are elements in a system that reciprocally define one another, but that's difficult for high school freshmen to grock. It's a lot easier define the subject as though it had some kind of semantic value, and save the big reveal that it doesn't for much later, when it starts to fall apart.
Why couldn't you just say that in the situation that a word changes form, another does too, that's called agreement and that the subject is defined as in the video. Or better yet just provide examples of the subject so that they pick it up naturally, the same way as no-one knows what a dog is defined as but knows what it means instinctively.
Also, why would you have to explain what a subject is to define agreement? Don't other forms of agreement exist that don't involve the subject?
Okay, you're right: I was sloppy there. You can define agreement without using the subject; I was referring specifically to the kind of verb agreement which exists in languages where verbs agree with their subjects. I was being sloppy at least in part because the precise definition of linguistic items in formal terms is an exhausting and very abstract process, one which difficult for me on an off-day, and even more difficult young people without fully developed abstract reasoning skills, without practice thinking systematically about language.
You are, of course, correct that I don't have to talk about grammar at all as part of my job, if my job is to inculcate linguistic proficiency. This is not currently the entirety of my job, and it is certainly not the job of English teachers teaching elementary students grammatical concepts for the first time.
Verbs are not "action words"; nouns are not words for "person, places, or things"; and the subject of a sentence is not the "doer of the verb." But once we have a "good enough" way to identify a grammatical item, one that is couched in less abstract alienating terms, we can begin the hard work of thinking about how these items interact with one another; developing a true definition, one grounded in linguistic reality instead of semantic approximation, is the end-point of this process, not its beginning.
@@samuelhotchkiss6086 After you define both, say that in Latin the verbs agree with the subject!
@@Anonymous-df8it Yes, that is exactly the sequence I was proposing: this is why initially defining the subject as "what the verb agrees with" will not work for most students.
@@samuelhotchkiss6086 You define the subject after you define agreement
And this is all before we talk about other languages with ergative/absolutive case structure.
Another example of this problem:
In his witness statement for the prosecution, the cop I was arrested by (on charges that were dismissed in court) conveniently switched to the passive voice while glossing over the part when he assaulted me. 🙃
When news reports or police statements use the passive voice to describe police violence, or talk about "a scuffle" or "a scrap", then it almost always means the cops started it. (What happened to me was on the very mild end of the nefarious ways this trick gets used.)
like describing something as 'a fight' when it was clearly an assault.
lol not quite passive voice but recently there was this very touching post by some PD about a dog they lost tragically in the line of duty, who was shot while chasing a suspect... funny how they didn't mention once how THEY shot it, not the suspect. whoopsie.
Wait, then what about languages where the verb doesn't show any agreement with the subject or object? For example, isolating languages.
What about 'The dog caught the ball?'
i love zoe bee!!!
It sounds like it might be an English problem because my teachers never made this mistake (I am a native Hebrew speaker) and it was a bit jarring to hear her calling the subject of the sentence an object because it was passive.
i'm going to be pedantic as well, hope you don't mind. you said that subject and object are purely grammatical, while agent and patient are semantic. well babey, both are purely grammatical, but subject and object are purely syntax. i've seen that americans equate grammar to syntax, while what i learnt is that Grammar is the study of the rules of languages and syntax, morphology, semantics, phonetics and phonology are the subjects that it encompass
yes i should have said syntactical and semantic to be clearer, but i did mean that agent and patient are grammatical too, but not "pure" grammar in the same sense of the word as "pure maths" (ie morphology and syntax)
@@kklein oh I see. interesting. I had never differentiated between grammar subcategories as purer than others. I totally see what you mean, tho. but personally I feel bad for semantics and phonetics and all those little guys who sometimes get overlooked as "less than" morphosyntaxis
How about ergative-absolutive languages where the verb agrees with the object? Honest question I'm not a linguist.
Would you say that in the sentence “The ball is caught by the dog” that the verb is “is”, not “is caught”? And “caught by the ball” is as much the object as, say, “green” is in “The ball is green”?