Active voice is a grammatical voice common in many of the world's languages. It is the unmarked voice for clauses featuring a transitive verb in nominative–accusative languages, including English and most other Indo-European languages.
Active voice is used in a clause whose subject expresses the agent of the main verb. That is, the subject does the action designated by the verb. A sentence whose agent is marked as grammatical subject is called an active sentence. In contrast, a sentence in which the subject has the role of patient or theme is called a passive sentence, and its verb is expressed in passive voice. Many languages have both an active and a passive voice; this allows for greater flexibility in sentence construction, as either the semantic agent or patient may take the syntactic role of subject.
Read more about Active Voice: Examples
Famous quotes containing the words active and/or voice:
“Communists have always played an active role in the fight by colonial countries for their freedom, because the short- term objects of Communism would always correspond with the long-term objects of freedom movements.”
—Nelson Mandela (b. 1918)
“My solitaria
Are the meditations of a central mind.
I hear the motions of the spirit and the sound
Of what is secret becomes, for me, a voice
That is my own voice speaking in my ear.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)