
Many English speakers cannot understand basic grammar - fogus
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100706082156.htm
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tzs
I have never really understood why passive voice gets a bad rap. Consider
these two sentences:

    
    
        The sailor hit the soldier.
    
        The soldier was hit by the sailor.
    

If I was writing primarily about the sailor, I'd choose the first. If I was
writing primarily about the soldier, I'd choose the second. That way, the
person I'm focusing on is mentioned first.

For instance, if I was writing about the soldier's day:

    
    
        The soldier woke up. He had breakfast. He was hit by a sailor.
    

seems better to me than:

    
    
        The solder woke up. He had breakfast. The sailor hit him.
    

The latter seems to shift the emphasis to the sailor, whereas using passive
voice puts the soldier first in every sentence, providing a unifying structure
to the paragraph.

~~~
Gormo
The "bad rap" is due to the the fact that the passive voice does not require
the subject of the sentence to be explicitly stated, and so is commonly used
as a means of being evasive and misleading.

"The soldier was hit by the sailor" vs. "the sailor hit the soldier" are both
clear and descriptive, and effectively shift the emphasis between the soldier
and sailor as you described.

But it's more common to see examples like this:

"Unfortunately, your funds have been misplaced. The cause of the problem is
currently being researched. You will be informed as soon as the situation has
been resolved."

...which deliberately avoids informing the recipient as to who is responsible
for the problem, who is attempting to fix it, and who will inform them of the
resolution.

~~~
swombat
No, actually the bad rap is due to the fact that the passive voice sounds,
well, more passive.

"The sailor hit the solider" inherently sounds more dynamic and active than
"The soldier was hit by the sailor."

Taking the GP's example:

"The soldier woke up. He had breakfast. He was hit by a sailor."

sounds only marginally worse than the active version, but that's in great part
because that's a lousy paragraph to begin with. If you actually write it with
some sort of flair for interesting rhythm and verbs, it might become:

"The soldier awoke in the early morning and had a hearty breakfast at the inn,
devouring some eggs and bacon that would give him strength for the hard day
ahead. Then, as he stepped out of the inn, the sailor bashed him on the side
of the head with an oar."

This is no great artistic creation, but it is at least a passably decent
paragraph. Now turn the verbs into passive mode and see how it falls apart and
becomes bland and, well, passive:

"The soldier awoke in the early morning and had a hearty breakfast at the inn.
Eggs and bacon were devoured that would give him strength for the hard day
ahead. Then, as he stepped out of the inn, he was bashed on the side of the
head by the sailor, with an oar."

The second version is distinctly worse, and that's all because of the passive
voice.

Note: Before you respond to explain how the passive voice is appropriate in
many situations, yes, I do acknowledge that. The passive voice is great when
you know how to use it. Hell, it's as essential to pacing the english language
as short-selling is essential to maintaining healthy markets. In most cases,
though people use too much passive voice and too little active voice.

------
asolove
What is "basic" grammar? The only details provided in this article discuss
active v. passive constructions. An excellent question then is: does "basic"
English grammar include passive constructions?

Certainly we all expect that children speak in the active, pass through a
period of school where they heavily adopt the passive as part of a larger
attempt to "sound smart" while writing, and then eventually make it to the
goal of writing fluently with the simplest language possible.

Is it possible that the passive is in some sense less basic to the brain's
language processing than the active?

The research seems to have shown we should simply change the definition of
"basic" rather than conclude that the Chomsky model is wrong.

~~~
hugh3
How many languages actually have a passive voice? Wikipedia says that passive
voices are common in many languages, but it doesn't give any examples of
languages which lack passive voices.

It would be interesting if any languages lacked an active voice. I have my
doubts.

And of course, there are plenty of other possible constructions we don't get
in English, like the zillions of possibilities presented by Latin. Wikipedia
also notes the existence of an "adversative passive" voice in some Asian
languages, only used when the action had adverse consequences. Weird.

But really, maybe Microsoft Word grammar check was right all along:
unnecessary use of the passive voice is confusing. The example "The sailor was
hit by the soldier" really is a little more confusing than its active
equivalent in which the soldier hits the sailor. The passive construction may
be less confusing in the kinds of situations where it's actually used: ie
where the actual hitter is not named "The sailor got hit".

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RiderOfGiraffes
For years advertisers have known that active sentences and imperatives work
better: "Buy Now", "Visit us at ..." and so on. This article suggests that
passive forms might simply not be understood as well.

    
    
        "Our results show that a proportion of people
         with low educational attainment make errors
         with understanding the passive, ..."
    

Perhaps the active forms are more effective in advertising (and elsewhere)
simply because more people understand them.

------
kevinpet
"The supposition that everyone in a linguistic community shares the same
grammar is a central tenet of Noam Chomsky's theory of universal grammar."

Clearly the author of this article does not understand the basics of
linguistics. I suspect that he or she does no better than chance in
summarizing the results of research.

~~~
dmlorenzetti
Not to mention the fact that the title is wrong.

"Many English speakers cannot understand basic grammar" should read "do not"--
as evidenced by the statement "Participants with low levels of educational
attainment were given instruction following the tests, and they were able to
learn the constructions very quickly."

------
yanowitz
I think the study to which the article refers can be found here
[http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/english/staff/profiles/ewadabrows...](http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/english/staff/profiles/ewadabrowska.html)
([http://www.cogling.group.shef.ac.uk/publications/Ind_diffs_r...](http://www.cogling.group.shef.ac.uk/publications/Ind_diffs_review.pdf)
and
[http://www.cogling.group.shef.ac.uk/publications/More%20indi...](http://www.cogling.group.shef.ac.uk/publications/More%20individual%20differences.pdf))

I find these results fascinating. Are they any linguistic folks reading this
discussion? I'd love to hear from them in more detail about what this implies
for Chomsky's work.

~~~
asolove
Agreed.

The neurological basis for the relationship between what English grammar calls
subject and predicate is a really interesting subject, and verb voice is
obviously very related.

My background in all this comes from a few classes in Chinese linguistics.
Chinese, like many East Asian languages, divides sentences into "topic" and
"comment" rather than "subject" and "predicate," so that the topic can be what
we would consider the verb's object even without the verb being explicitly
marked as passive.

Yet modern Mandarin does have something like the passive with the modifier
"bei-" which, when put before a verb, indicates the passive. This has a
somewhat literary or ironic tone and is almost always used for negative
actions like "he was hit" or "she was criticized." My favorite usage: When the
Chinese government blocks website in the name of "social harmony", you say the
site "bei-harmony," or "been harmonized."

------
a-priori
I bet if you transcribed normal, everyday speech you wouldn't find too many
instances of passive voice, even by well-educated people who can understand it
(i.e, not the group they're talking about). It's just not something you
encounter most of the time as an English speaker.

Everyone finds passive voice harder to understand. I wouldn't be surprised if
people learn to parse the passive voice by first transforming it into its
equivalent in the active voice.

~~~
kscaldef
"My brother was hit by a car."

"My grandfather was diagnosed with cancer."

"The US was robbed of a goal in their match versus Slovenia."

"I was spellbound by the movie."

~~~
a-priori
You're right, I take back what I said. There are everyday uses of the passive
voice. Thanks for correcting me.

------
imagii
This is going to get worse.

Walk into a high school classroom, write a sentence on the board, and ask the
students to label the parts of speech.

Don't be too surprised when only two or three students even bother to raise
their hands.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
While I have sympathy with this comment, it's not the same thing. Knowing the
names for bits of a sentence is different from being able to comprehend a
sentence. You might know what an adverbal phrase is, without knowing the name
for it. To say otherwise suggests the strong form of Sapir-Worf, which is
generally discredited (while still actually being contentious).

This article isn't even talking about the ability to name the different
grammatical components, though. It seems to be talking about comprehension of
sentence forms. There is a hint that using "every" can sometimes be
misinterpreted.

But we see that linguistic shift anyway. Things like "I could care less" are
regarded as conveying the speaker's meaning, while the linguistic analysis of
the form suggests a meaning opposite to that normally inferred, or implied.

"Every" is frequently misplaced, and people seem to assume they know what the
speaker means. Following logical analyses we often find that the speaker
didn't actually say what they meant, and the listener understood something
different again.

~~~
kenj0418
Right, kick ass. Well, don't want to sound like a dXXX or nothin', but, ah...
it says on your chart that you're fXXXed up. Ah, you talk like a fag, and your
sXXX's all retarded. What I'd do, is just like... like... you know, like, you
know what I mean, like...

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
Not sure if that's supposed to be informative, clever, funny, or something
else. It's certainly not communicating anything to me, except something about
you - something I'm sure you didn't intend to say.

~~~
jeebusroxors
His comment is a quote from the movie Idiocracy
(<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/>).

Of course I can't speak for him, but the premise of the movie is a slow steady
decline in education leading to the above quote, which is given to the
protagonist (after he wakes up in the future) by a doctor as a diagnosis.

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zokier
Are examples of sentences with "basic grammar" available somewhere?

