Professor Dave here, let’s talk about the passive voice.
Just like verbs in English, Italian verbs have a passive form.
The word passive comes from a Latin verb which means to suffer.
A sentence is active when the subject performs the action described by the verb.
But a sentence is passive when the subject is acted upon, or “suffers” the action.
This sentence is active because the subject, il cane, is performing the action.
This sentence is passive, because we have swapped perspective.
The bone is now the subject, and it is being eaten by the dog, so it is receiving the action.
In swapping perspective, in this manner, the direct object will become the subject, and
the subject becomes the “agent”, preceded by the preposition “da”, either alone,
or combined with a form of the definite article.
The passive can be used in all tenses and moods.
It is constructed with the desired form of the auxiliary verb essere and the past participle.
Since the participle is used with essere, it will have to agree with the subject in
gender and number, as usual.
The main reason for the use of the passive voice would be style and emphasis.
When using the passive voice, the action itself gains greater relevance in the sentence than
the subject of the action.
This is a construction that you will see more commonly in writing than in speech.
We see that the important information is that the bank was robbed.
Who did it?
This may still be unknown, so the passive voice is a good way to avoid that lack of
information.
Let’s see some more examples of this type of usage, where the subject of the action
is either unknown, unimportant, or obvious enough that we don’t need to express it.
We should note that only transitive verbs can be made passive, as one might expect.
Remember that in the passive, the past participle must agree with the subject in gender and number.
In the case of passato prossimo, essere is followed by two past participles.
Sometimes, the verb venire can substitute the auxiliary essere as a variation, but only
in simple tenses.
Sometimes even andare can be seen, but unlike venire, andare will add necessity.
Now let’s take a closer look at the conjugation of the tenses.
As we will see, only the verb “to be” is conjugated in the different tenses, and
the past participle must agree with the subject.
Now, in order to switch tenses, from present tense to some other tense, all we need to
do is modify the auxiliary, while the participle won’t change.
As there must be agreement, we will list all possible forms, while reading only one.
Now that we have covered all the tenses, let’s practice.
How might we transform the following sentences into the passive voice?
And that should be plenty, so let’s check comprehension.