31 Passive Sentences and Shifting Vowels
An active sentence has a subject that is doing the action. The sentence ‘I helped him’ is active because it is ‘I,’ the subject, that is doing the helping. Transitive sentences (see §1) are active.
For every active sentence there is a passive sentence that means the same thing. For example, ‘The girl helped the dog’ is active, and ‘The dog was helped by the girl’ is its passive form.
Active: The girl helped the dog.
Passive: The dog was helped by the girl.
Most languages of the world has ways of forming both active and passive sentences. There are exceptions, but Klallam is not one. However, Klallam passives differ from English passives in two important respects.
The most obvious difference is that in Klallam a passive sentence is formed just by adding a suffix ‑əŋ to the basic transitive verb.
The second difference is that in English the passive is always optional. In English you can always replace a passive sentence with its active form. In Klallam, however, there are certain situations where the passive must be used.
Just as with the two basic types of object pronoun (discussed in §7), there are two basic forms of the passive: a control form, where the actor is in control, and a noncontrol form, where the actor is not in control.
Another feature of passives in English is that they can have an actor mentioned in a ‘by’ phrase, as in ‘she was helped by the boy.’ Klallam can add actors in a similar way. Review §8.1 on how the preposition ʔaʔ is used for this purpose.