you’re welcome.
Well, the definitions of passiv and aktiv can be guessed from the above definitions.
An aktiv sentence is one in which the action of the sentence is performed by the entity. That is, when the institution and its subject are the same. For example
Jack spielt sehr gut Klavier.
Here, the entity and the subject are the same because the action of the sentence is performed by the entity.
And there is a passive sentence whose action is done on the entity instead of by the entity. Or maybe it can be said that the subject of the sentence is not the subject of the sentence. For example:
This room is used by the students.
Or
Die Sitzung wurde verschoben.
Now a few points:
First of all, why are the previous definitions wrong?
The reason is that the fact that the subject is not clear or important does not mean that the sentence must be passive. For example, we can say:
The door was closed
It is true that the subject is not clear here, but the sentence can be activated in another way:
Jemand hat die Tür geschlossen.
Here too, it is not clear who closed the door, but the sentence is aktiv. In fact, whether the subject is important or not clear can be a criterion for whether to mention the subject or not if we want to use a passive sentence; But there is no criterion for the sentence to be passive!
The next point is that even in passive sentences, the subject may be very important. For example:
Unsere Gesellschaft wurde betroffen.
This sentence is passive and there may be no problem in terms of grammar, but what about the meaning? In fact, a question mark is created in the mind of the reader of the sentence that ok, by whom or what did this happen? Here it is better to say, for example:
Unsere Gesellschaft wurde vom Fernsehen affected.
The question that arises is when to use passive and when to use aktiv?
There is no definite answer to this question. In official texts, passive sentences are more common, but in general, it is you who can determine whether passive or aktiv sentences are better used for that part of your text.
One last point is that only active sentences can be converted into passive sentences when the verb of the sentence is transitive, that is, it has an object. In converting the aktiv sentence to passiv, the object of the aktiv sentence becomes the object of the passive sentence. As a result, it is true that die Tür in the sentence
Jemand hat die Tür geschlossen.
It is an object but in the sentence
The door was closed
It is no longer an object, but an entity. But in none of these sentences, this word does not have the role of subject.
There is a special use in the German colloquial language for the passive, and that is when we want to say that something is done somewhere or at a time. For example:
Da wird geschwommen
They swim/can swim there.
In this case, we don’t have a verb type.
#passive
This post is written by EhSep