"passive sentences" is a correct and usable term in written English.
You can use it when you want to refer to a sentence where the object of the sentence is being acted upon by the subject, instead of the subject performing an action. For example: "The ball was thrown by the boy." This is an example of a passive sentence.
"Constructing passive sentences is a way of concealing your own testicles, lest someone cut them off," Morales says, with no more fuss than a butcher jointing a chicken.
The transformational model has also been adapted for another field of psycholinguistics, the processing and comprehension of speech; early experiments in this area suggested, for example, that passive sentences took longer to process than their active counterparts because an extra grammatical rule was necessary to produce the passive sentence.
Studies have shown that grammar for active and passive sentences differs between Chinese and English.
We demonstrate that indeed TD, but not G-SLI, children are able to use phonotactics cues in parsing passive sentences.
We predicted that TD children would be able to use phonotactics to parse a form like touched or hugged as a participle, and hence interpret passive sentences correctly.
We used a blocked design functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study to examine brain activations during processing of three types of Chinese sentences: active sentences, passive sentences, and general declarative sentences in native Chinese speakers.
All these were short sentences studded with the action of verbs and not passive sentence fragments.
In its crudest form, the notion is that an active sentence ("John loved Mary") and a passive sentence ("Mary was loved by John") might seem superficially different; yet they have some important underlying commonality, both in meaning and in their representation in the brain.
These results provide evidence suggesting that different strategies are used for Chinese as compared to English for grammatical passive sentence inversions.
A self-paced listening task was designed to investigate passive sentence processing in typically developing (TD) children and children with Grammatical-Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI).
From this perspective, the structure and constituents are the same in the proposition that Mary is admired by John, even though 'Mary' is the grammatical subject of the passive sentence.
