1231: Passival pt. 3 Apr 23, 2018

There are a lot of ways to use the passive voice in order to deflect blame. For instance, "mistakes were made" does not reveal who made said mistakes. However, a few verbs allow for this hidden agency to be carried across without the passive, per se. 'Broke' for instance in "my pencil broke" is active in the way that it is formed, but it's passive semantically, because pencils cannot break themselves. This is another example of the passival, which is a generally overlooked and fairly rare middle voice in English. Also, it might be interesting to note that while 'broke' and some other verbs can be active, passive, and passival, intransitive verbs cannot even be passive; no one could say "he has been died" nor "she has been slept" because those verbs do not take objects ever, and in this situation, the subject is also the object.
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