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Comment by brookst

7 days ago

Thats not passive voice. Passive voice is painfully boring to read is active. The preamble can be read like “however”, and is unnecessary; what a former editor of mine called “throat-clearing words”.

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brookst

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jcranmer  7 days ago

"the points already made" is what is known as the "bare passive", and yes, it is the passive voice. You can see e.g. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 for a more thorough description of the passive voice.

As I said elsewhere, one of the problems with the passive voice is that people are so bad at spotting it that they can at best only recognize it in its worst form, and assume that the forms that are less horrible somehow can't be the passive voice.

  • kragen  7 days ago

    I'm not sure this is a "bare passive" like the beginning of "The day's work [being] done, they made their way back to the farmhouse," one of the bare-passive examples at your link. An analogous construction would be, "The points already [being] made, I ceased harassing the ignorant". But in "In addition to the points already made" this case "the point already made" is not a clause; it's a noun phrase, the object of the preposition "to". Its head is "points", and I believe that "made" is modifying that head.

    Can you insert an elided copula into it without changing the meaning and grammatical structure? I'm not sure. I don't think so. I think "In addition to the points already being made" means something different: the object of the preposition "to" is now "being", and we are going to discuss things in addition to that state of affairs, perhaps other things that have happened to the points (being sharpened, perhaps, or being discarded), not things in addition to the points.

kragen  7 days ago

Yes, the verb "is" in "Passive voice is painfully boring to read" is in the active voice, not the passive voice. But umanwizard was not saying that "is" was in the passive voice. Rather, they were saying that the past participle "made", in the phrase "the points already made", is a passive-voice use of the verb "make".

I don't know enough about English grammar to know whether this is correct, but it's not the assertion you took issue with.

Why am I not sure it's correct? If I say, "In addition to the blood so red," I am quite sure that "red" is not in the passive voice, because it's not even a verb. It's an adjective. Past participles are commonly used as adjectives in English in contexts that are unambiguously not passive-voice verbs; for example, in "Vito is a made man now," the past participle "made" is being used as an attributive adjective. And this is structurally different from the attributive-verb examples of "truly verbal adjectives" in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44493969 jcranmer says it's something called a "bare passive", but I'm not sure.

It's certainly a hilarious thing to put in a comment deploring the passive voice, at least.

  • thaumasiotes  7 days ago

    > But umanwizard was not saying that "is" was in the passive voice. Rather, they were saying that the past participle "made", in the phrase "the points already made", is a passive-voice use of the verb "make".

    > I don't know enough about English grammar to know whether this is correct, but it's not the assertion you took issue with.

    The most natural interpretation is indeed that the participle made is being used as a full participle and not as a zero-derived adjective. For example, you could give it a really strong verbal sense by saying "the points already made at length [...]" or "the points made so many times [...]".

    > So, is "made" in "the points already made" really in passive voice as it would be in "the points that are already made"

    Though I wouldn't say the same thing there; if you say "the points that are already made", that pretty much has to be an adjective. If you want it to be a passive verb, go with "the points that have already been made".

    Anyway, I would be really surprised if die-hard thoughtless style prescriptivists thought that the advice "don't use the passive voice" was meant to apply to participles. It's a quibble that you don't care about and they don't care about or understand. You're never going to get anywhere with someone by telling them they mean something they know perfectly well they don't mean.

    • kragen  7 days ago

      You say:

      > Anyway, I would be really surprised if die-hard thoughtless style prescriptivists thought that the advice "don't use the passive voice" was meant to apply to participles.

      Presumably you mean phrases including participles, not participles by themselves. But https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 "The passive in English" says:

      > The relevance of participles is that a passive clause always has its verb in a participial form.

      So, what are you saying they do think it was meant to apply to, if every passive clause always includes a participle? I'm confused.

      With respect to:

      > Though I wouldn't say the same thing there; if you say "the points that are already made", that pretty much has to be an adjective. If you want it to be a passive verb, go with "the points that have already been made".

      the passive-clause examples given in Pullum's blog post I linked above include "Each graduate student is given a laptop," which sounds structurally identical to your example (except that an indirect object is present, showing that it cannot be an adjective) and clarifies:

      > The verb was doesn't really add any meaning, but it enables the whole thing to be put into the preterite tense so that the event can be asserted to have occurred in the past. Changing was to is would put the clause into the present tense, and replacing it by will be or is going to be would permit reference to future time; but the passive VP damaged by storms would stay the same in each case. (Notice, the participle damaged does not itself make any past time reference, despite the name "past participle".)

      So it sounds like your grammatical analysis is explicitly contradicting Pullum's, which probably means you're wrong, but I'm not sure I understand it.

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