🗣️ 28. Voice and the passive

French has one periphrastic passive, être + past participle (La maison a été construite en 1900), and several constructions that do part of its work: the reflexive or "middle" passive with se (Ce livre se lit facilement), the impersonal passive (Il a été décidé que …), the passive of experience with se faire + infinitive (Il s'est fait voler sa voiture), and, above all in speech, the active with the indefinite subject on (On a volé ma voiture). Only a direct object can become the subject of a passive. The written language uses the être passive freely; speech uses it a quarter as often and almost never with an agent. This chapter gives the être passive, its restrictions and the three readings of être + participle, the agent, the se passive and the other pronominal verbs, the impersonal passive, se faire + infinitive, on, and what decides the choice of voice, with the UD analysis and counts. The forms of the participle and its agreement are in the auxiliaries chapter; causatives with faire in chapter 23.

Contents:

1. Overview
2. The être passive
3. Which verbs have a passive
4. Être + participle: passive, state or compound tense
5. The agent: par and de
6. The se passive and the middle
7. Pronominal verbs and the voice of se
8. The impersonal passive
9. Se faire, se voir, se laisser + infinitive
10. On
11. Choosing the voice
12. The UD analysis
13. How Mova handles it
14. Sources

1. Overview

Counts per 10 000 words (UD 2.18, 2026-11-06):

The written treebanks have three to four times as many être passives as the spoken ones, and almost all the agents; the spoken ones replace the passive by on (173 per 10 000 words in ParisStories).

2. The être passive

The passive is être + past participle; the participle agrees with the subject in gender and number. The tense is carried by être, and the compound tenses have été:

All tenses and moods have a passive: il sera construit, qu'il soit construit, il aurait été construit, être construit, ayant été construit.

Agentless by default. In GSD 3 401 clauses have an aux:pass; 756 of them (22%) have an agent (obl:agent). In Sequoia 11% have one, in the spoken treebanks one or two in a hundred (2026-11-06). The passive is the construction that leaves out the agent.

The verbs. The commonest passive verbs of GSD are those of encyclopaedic description: utiliser 82, nommer 69, connaître 49 (être connu pour), mettre 47, considérer 45, appeler 39, élire 39, créer 38, construire 36, publier 35, faire 33, donner 30, organiser 27, composer 25, classer 25.

3. Which verbs have a passive

Only a direct object becomes a subject. The passive needs a transitive verb with a direct object: On construit la maison → La maison est construite. An indirect object cannot be promoted: English He was given a book and She was told to leave have no direct French counterpart (*Il a été donné un livre in that sense, *Elle a été dite de partir). French uses the active with on (On lui a donné un livre), the impersonal passive in formal style (Il lui a été donné un livre), or se voir + infinitive (Il s'est vu remettre un prix, §9).

Exceptions. Obéir, désobéir, pardonner take à but have a passive in classical and formal French: Il veut être obéi. Vous êtes pardonné. — survivals of an older transitive construction.

Verbs without a passive. Intransitive verbs; verbs with an object that is not a patient: avoir (*Une voiture est eue par Paul), posséder in many uses, comporter, coûter, peser, mesurer, valoir with a measure (Il pèse 80 kg); light-verb objects (*Lieu a été eu); reflexive verbs; many verbs of feeling in their stative sense take the passive only with de (§5).

4. Être + participle: passive, state or compound tense

The sequence être + past participle has three readings:

• an action passive: La porte est ouverte par le gardien chaque matin — an event, with or without an agent;
• a state (resultative passive): La porte est ouverte "The door is open" — the result of an event, with the participle close to an adjective;
• a compound tense of a verb that takes être (the verbs of motion and change of state, and all pronominal verbs): Il est parti. Elle est née en 1900. Ils se sont rencontrés.

The third is decided by the verb (partir, venir, naître, mourir take être; construire does not); the first two by the context. The auxiliaries chapter gives the list of être verbs; how children acquire the choice of auxiliary in French and Italian, and the role of the input, is studied in (lauzon-2025).

In UD the passive is aux:pass with nsubj:pass for the subject, and the participle has Voice=Pass (7 693 verbs in GSD); the compound tense is aux:tense; the stative reading is analysed by GSD as a passive or as a copula + adjective depending on whether the participle is felt as verbal. Neither the treebank nor a parser can always tell them apart from the words alone.

5. The agent: par and de

The agent is introduced by par (1 513 of the 1 554 obl:agent of GSD) or by de (34) (2026-11-06). De is used with verbs of feeling and of state, where the "agent" is not an actor: aimé de tous, respecté de ses collègues, connu de tous, entouré de ses amis, couvert de neige, accompagné de son frère. With some of these both are possible, de for the state and par for the event: La maison est entourée d'arbres / La maison a été entourée par la police.

Agents in participle phrases. Nearly half of the GSD agents are not in an aux:pass clause: 631 depend on a participle that modifies a noun (acl: une ville fondée par les Romains), 61 on a participle in an adverbial clause, 61 on a coordinated participle. The reduced passive of the noun phrase is the commonest place of the agent in written French.

6. The se passive and the middle

A transitive verb with the reflexive se and its patient as subject expresses a passive without an agent:

Ce livre se vend bien. — Ça ne se fait pas. — Le vin blanc se boit frais. — Ça se dit pas. (spoken)

The construction is limited to the third person and usually to a generic or habitual event, with an adverb of manner or a modal sense ("can be, should be"): Ce mot ne s'emploie plus. Le français se parle au Québec. An agent is rarely expressed (*Ce livre se vend par les libraires is odd). With a specific event it is a written, journalistic passive: La réunion s'est tenue hier. Le match s'est joué à Paris.

In GSD the se of these verbs is expl:pass (686, 17 per 10 000 words). The commonest verbs are se situer 47, se faire 32, se tenir 29, se développer 25, s'étendre 23, se retrouver 17, se produire 16, se terminer 16, se distinguer 15, s'élever 14, se poursuivre 14 (2026-11-06). The list shows how far the label reaches beyond the textbook middle: se situer, se trouver, s'étendre describe position, se développer, se terminer, se poursuivre are anticausatives (the event happens without an agent: La crise se poursuit). The boundary between expl:pass and expl:pv (§7) is the annotators' judgment.

7. Pronominal verbs and the voice of se

The reflexive clitic se (me, te, nous, vous in the other persons) has several values, and UD French separates them:

All pronominal verbs take être in the compound tenses (Elle s'est lavée, Il s'est souvenu), and the agreement of their participle follows the function of se — with se when it is a direct object, none when it is an indirect object (Ils se sont parlé), with the subject for inherent pronominals (Elle s'est évanouie). The 1990 rectifications made the participle of laisser + infinitive invariable, also in the pronominal use (Elle s'est laissé mourir; cslf-1990). The details are in the auxiliaries chapter.

The anticausative. Many verbs of change of state have a transitive use and an intransitive use with se: Il ouvre la porte / La porte s'ouvre, On a cassé le verre / Le verre s'est cassé, Le vent sèche le linge / Le linge sèche (without se: some verbs have both). The se form says the event happened by itself; it is not a passive with a hidden agent. GSD includes these in expl:pass.

8. The impersonal passive

A passive verb can have the empty il as subject, with the patient as a clause or a postverbal noun phrase: Il a été décidé que …, Il fut alors décidé qu'à l'avenir … (fr-ud-dev_00635), Il est interdit de fumer, Il a été procédé à l'arrestation de …, Il lui a été remis un prix. The construction is formal and administrative; it also makes a passive of intransitive verbs with a prepositional complement (Il a été répondu à sa lettre), which the personal passive cannot do. GSD has 27 passive clauses with an expl:subj, Sequoia 28 (2026-11-06).

9. Se faire, se voir, se laisser + infinitive

Se faire + infinitive is a passive in which the subject is affected by an event caused by someone else, often to its detriment, and in speech also a passive of action: Il s'est fait voler sa voiture "He had his car stolen", Elle s'est fait renverser par une voiture "She got knocked over by a car", Il s'est fait élire "He got himself elected". Faire is aux:caus and the infinitive heads the clause (chapter 23, §8); in GSD about fifty causatives have a reflexive pronoun (2026-11-06), and faire is also aux:pass 21 times, in passives of the type se faire élire. The participle fait is invariable before an infinitive.

Se voir + infinitive is the passive of the recipient that the être passive lacks: Il s'est vu refuser l'entrée "He was refused entry", Elle s'est vu décerner un prix "She was awarded a prize". Se laisser + infinitive adds consent or passivity: Il s'est laissé convaincre.

10. On

On is a subject pronoun of the third person singular with a human referent: indefinite "someone, people" (On a volé ma voiture, On dit que …), generic "one, you" (On ne sait jamais), and in speech the first person plural "we" (On y va ?). It is the commonest way of not naming the agent in speech: in ParisStories on is the subject 741 times (173 per 10 000 words), nous 4 times (chapter 21, §4). The verb is singular; an adjective or participle agrees with the sense when on is "we": On est contents.

On + active and the passive are not equivalent in information structure: the passive makes the patient the subject and topic, on keeps the patient as an object after the verb or as a clitic before it (On l'a volée). In written French l'on after et, ou, où, si, que is a careful-style variant (67 in GSD).

11. Choosing the voice

Animacy. In a sentence-recall study, speakers chose the passive more often when the patient was animate than when it was inanimate (a sentence about a bitten postman is more likely to come back as Le facteur a été mordu par le chien than one about a torn letter), while animacy did not change the order of the objects of ditransitive verbs or of coordinated nouns; the authors take this as evidence that animacy acts on the choice of grammatical function (who is the subject) rather than directly on the order of words (thuilier-2021).

Acquisition. French-speaking children understand short and long passives about equally well, and action passives (Le chat est poursuivi par le chien) better than passives of psychological verbs (Le chat est aimé par le chien): in a comprehension study the action passives were at ceiling by age 8 while the psychological ones were still slightly below (durrleman-2017).

Register. The être passive is a feature of written informative French (85 per 10 000 words in GSD, 108 in Sequoia against 25–30 in speech); speech uses on, the se passive, se faire and the active with a dislocated object (La voiture, on me l'a volée).

12. The UD analysis

The spoken treebanks use the same labels; ALTS has no nsubj:pass (chapter 20, §8).

13. How Mova handles it

What is done. nsubj:pass, aux:pass and obl:agent are in Mova's relation set and kept; expl:pass and expl:pv fold to expl, aux:caus to aux. The tag mapping gives the passive participle VBN, the same tag as the participle of a compound tense. Traces of the parser trained on the GSD training file (en explain, 12 epochs, beam 8, CPU, 2026-11-06):

The parser learns the passive shape well, but it never chose obl:agent in these sentences although the label is in its set and in the training data; and it confuses the être of a compound tense with the passive être, because the tagger gives both participles VBN and the parser has no list of être verbs.

What is not done.

• Voice in the frames. The English frames reader maps a passive to the active roles (the subject of a passive is the patient, the by-phrase the agent). For French, with obl:agent not predicted and expl:pass folded to expl, a se passive is not distinguished from a reflexive or an inherent pronominal: in Ce livre se vend bien nothing says that the book is sold rather than selling.
• Auxiliary selection. Mova has no list of the verbs that take être, so Il est venu and Il est vu cannot be told apart by rule.
• On. On is an ordinary third person subject for the parser; nothing resolves it to "someone", "people" or "we".
• Se faire, se voir + infinitive are not read as passives.

14. Sources

• Conseil supérieur de la langue française, Les rectifications de l'orthographe (1990), on laisser + infinitive: cslf-1990.
• Thuilier, Grant, Crabbé & Abeillé, Word order in French: the role of animacy (Glossa, 2021): thuilier-2021.
• Durrleman, Delage, Prévost & Tuller, The comprehension of passives in Autism Spectrum Disorder (Glossa, 2017): durrleman-2017.
• Lauzon, Folli, Sevdali & Gerard, Acquisition of auxiliary selection in French and Italian and the role of input (Glossa, 2025): lauzon-2025.
• UD French GSD, Sequoia, ParisStories, Rhapsodie, UD 2.18; sentences cited by sent_id; counts made with awk over the CoNLL-U files, 2026-11-06.
• Mova: en/src/main.rs (xpos_of, explain), en/src/gram.rs, prag/src/frames.rs.
• The full list is in Sources.

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/fr/28-voice-and-passive/