Voice

Voice is a category of inflection that allows different noun phrases to be focused in sentences. In the active voice in a sentence with an agent and a patient, the agent is focused by virtue of being the subject of the sentence:

But in the passive voice the patient is the subject of the sentence, and it gets the focus:

In English the passive is expressed periphrastically by a combination of the auxiliary verb be plus the past participle, in example (19) chased, but in Latin active and passive forms of the verbs are distinguished by inflectional suffixes:

There is a great deal more to be said about voice distinctions like active and passive .