1353: Passival pt. 4: Head Verbs Aug 25, 2018

With words to describe observation in English (e.g. 'smell'; 'look'; 'feel') there is an unusual ability that they can describe both the action of the observer and the observed. For instance, "he felt the cloth" uses a standard sentence-structure, but "the cloth felt soft" refers to the man feeling, but is not grammatically passive. Compare this with "the man touched the cloth" but not *"the cloth touched soft" and you will see just how strange this quality is. This is another example of the passival, a type of voice that is active in construction but passive in meaning.