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64 | 2021
Le passif dans la langue parlée

Passive Voice in Oral Speech
Edited by Badreddine Hamma
Lidil, n° 64 (2021)
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ISBN 978-2-37747-315-1
Français English

This issue is dedicated to the passive voice. It compiles works on various vernacular languages, sometimes with a contrastive dimension. The reason for this undertaking resides in the fact that the structure that is studied here is mainly considered in its oral applications, based on authentic situations of communication, which goes against what is observed in the grammatical tradition. Indeed, the passive voice has always been taught and described from the perspective of formatted, typical, and almost fixed situations originating from the written language or based on set phrases. Whenever the passive voice is mentioned, one can only think of the well-known example The mouse was eaten by the cat. The passive voice is more often than not perceived as the result of a swap in the order of a sentence that feels more neutral than its active counterpart would. It illustrates a certain scenario from the viewpoint of the “one to whom the action is done”. This grammatical swap in the order of the agents is identified as an operation of thematisation, or “object promotion”, which is generally construed as an indication of the importance or the salience of the passive subject (patient/object) at the expense of the agent. Nevertheless, by thoroughly taking into account data from real conversations that include a passive voice, it becomes apparent that, on the one hand, examples such as The mouse was eaten by the cat are rare or completely absent and on the other hand, these hypotheses don’t necessarily hold water. Therefore, contrary to popular belief, the agent that is explicitly expressed appears to be more important than the patient for at least two reasons: 1) the agent seems to be resisting any kind of suppression in spoken examples and 2) the patient appears as a weak and simple pronoun which refers to a referent that is already known, the focus of which does not exceed the reminder and activation of the reference. Therefore, it does not feel like it holds any salience of which the passive voice is at the source. With this in mind, this issue looks at various questions related to the passive voice in the languages under consideration with the aim of completing existing descriptions and rethinking those that don’t seem representative of this grammatical turn.
 

Editor’s notes

REMERCIEMENTS / ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 
Ont été sollicités pour évaluer les articles de ce numéro (dossier thématique + rubrique Varia) :
Tatiana Aleksandrova, Katia Bernardon, Christian Degache, Anne-Claude Demagny, Joaquim Dolz, Roggero Druetta, Pierre Escudé, Odette Gagnon, Raja Gmir, Lucia Gomez, Peter Helland, Christel Le Bellec, Monica Masperi, Agnès Millet, Iva Novakova, Sylvester Osu, Lassaad Oueslati, Rima Redouane, Nathalie Rossi-Gensane, Emmanuel Schang, Andreea Teletin, Linda Terrier, Stephan Wilhelm.

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