Stative and Dynamic Passive
In languages such as English, there is often a similarity between passive clauses expressing an action or event, such as:
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- The dog is fed (every day)
and clauses expressing a state, such as:
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- The dog is fed (for now).
In the first sentence the auxiliary is and the past participle fed combine to express the verbal passive voice, while in the second sentence is serves as an ordinary copula and the past participle as an ordinary adjective.
Sentences of the second type are sometimes confused with the passive voice, and in some treatments are considered to be a type of passive – a stative or static passive, in contrast to the dynamic or eventive passive exemplified by the first sentence. The stative type may also be called false passive. Some languages express or can express these meanings in contrasting ways.
Read more about this topic: Passive Voice
Famous quotes containing the words dynamic and/or passive:
“Magic is the envelopment and coercion of the objective world by the ego; it is a dynamic subjectivism. Religion is the coercion of the ego by gods and spirits who are objectively conceived beings in control of nature and man.”
—Richard Chase (b. 1914)
“The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread.... The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)