= Passive voice
<Passive voice> is a grammatical construction that changes how an event's participants are expressed, typically placing an affected participant in the <subject (grammar)> relation while omitting the actor or expressing it differently. It belongs to <grammatical voice>, not simply to a choice of slow or indirect wording.<Universal Dependencies annotation guidelines>[Voice, Pass; nsubj, passive-subject relation]{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 (grammar)> to <subject (grammar)>; 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 (grammar)> 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>.
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