134 CHAPTER 3. MORE GRAMMAR
3.2.11 Passive: /
Passiveconstructions are, as their name implies, constructions which de-
scribe actions in a passive voice. Unlike ”I eat dinner” or ”The cat is play-
ing with the squeaky toy”, which are inactivevoice, they refer to phrases
like ”Dinner was eaten by me” or ”The squeaky toy was played with by
the cat”. In Japanese, this passive voice, called
, is achieved through
the use of the two helper verbs (for verbs) and (for
verbs), which are added to a verb’s.
verb passive
+ + + + + + + + +verb passive
+
+
+irregular passive
- , - + ( being more common)
Thus, a simple phrase like
, meaning ”(I) eat”, can be made
passive: , ”(something) is being eaten (by someone)”.
This change from active voice to passive voice comes with two com-
plications in Japanese: first, what was first the direct object has now be-
come the verb subject instead. This is no different from English, except
because in Japanese the grammatical roles are explicitly wriĴen, we must