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Active voice is the grammatical voice of constructions such as The technician opened the valve, where the actor is expressed as subject. It contrasts with a corresponding passive voice construction, The valve was opened by the technician, in which that participant is expressed differently.^[ref]

The contrast holds the described event fixed while changing grammatical organization. In the first example, the valve is the object; in the second, it occupies the subject position. The actor's presence in a by-phrase does not make that phrase the subject.

Separating voice from other features avoids a common classification error. The technician did not open the valve remains active even though it denies that an opening occurred. Likewise, changing opened to opens can change grammatical tense without changing grammatical voice. A grammatical analysis should identify the construction and its participant relationships, rather than infer voice from whether the sentence sounds energetic or describes a completed action.

Bernard Comrie is a linguist specializing in linguistic typology and historical comparisons of languages. His research includes grammatical tense, grammatical voice and numeral systems, with fieldwork in geographically distant communities. His own account emphasizes examining many different kinds of language when assessing generalizations.^[ref]

A simple methodological example shows why this matters. English can form a passive voice construction such as The pump was repaired. Finding that construction in one language establishes a possibility, while a claim about all languages requires much wider evidence and explicit criteria for recognizing the relevant construction. This illustrates the difference between a description and a proposed cross-language generalization.

Bernard Comrie co-developed the Leipzig Glossing Rules by Bernard Comrie and others with Martin Haspelmath and Balthasar Bickel. The conventions expose how a proposed analysis segments and labels an expression, helping other researchers evaluate it.^[ref]

Grammatical voice concerns how a construction relates an event's participants to grammatical positions such as subject and object. Active voice and passive voice provide a familiar contrast, but the categories recognized across languages are not limited to that pair.^[ref]

In The mechanic repairs the pump, the mechanic is the subject. In The pump is repaired by the mechanic, the pump occupies that relation while the mechanic is expressed differently. Both can describe the same repair. Changing is repaired to was repaired instead changes grammatical tense while retaining passive voice.

A structural account can therefore hold the participants and event approximately fixed while varying their expression. Separating grammatical voice, grammatical tense and thematic roles prevents a parser or an experiment from treating those dimensions as interchangeable. It also makes the claimed invariants and changes in a comparison explicit.

Passive voice is a grammatical construction that changes how an event's participants are expressed, typically placing an affected participant in the subject relation while omitting the actor or expressing it differently. It belongs to grammatical voice, not simply to a choice of slow or indirect wording.^[ref]

Compare The mechanic repaired the pump with The pump was repaired by the mechanic. Both can describe the same repair, but the pump changes from object to subject; the mechanic is expressed in a separate phrase. Omitting that phrase gives The pump was repaired without specifying who performed the repair.

This is useful for separating thematic roles from grammatical relationships. A representation that treats every subject as the actor will misdescribe the passive example. The Universal Dependencies label nsubj:pass preserves subject status while recording the passive construction, making the analysis inspectable in a text corpus.