PASS Agentless passives
Definition
Passive voice constructions with BE auxiliary where no agent is expressed (e.g., “the ring was found”, “he was taken prisoner”).
Parent
Detection Rules
mfte
MFTE tags PASS on the VBN (past participle) following a form of BE. Anchor on last (the participle) to match MFTE’s tagging convention and enable tag refinement (refines: VBN).
cql[lemma="be" & pos="VB.*"] [pos="VBN"]
Verb with auxpass dependent. Agentless if no “by” + NP follows. Requires post-filter to exclude cases with “by” agent phrase.
semgrex{pos:/VB.*/}=verb >auxpass {lemma:be}
pybiber
Auxpass dependency label. pybiber finds all auxpass tokens then excludes those with “by” 2-3 tokens ahead (which become PASSBY).
cql[dep="auxpass"]
combine: _ & !PASSBY
BE auxiliary + past participle. Less accurate — false positives from progressive BE + adjective. Requires post-filter to exclude by-passives.
cql[lemma="be"] [pos="VBN"]
Normalization
Per finite_verbs
Examples
The ring was found in the river.
He was taken prisoner and brought before the king.
The letter was written in haste.
He must have been burgled.
Source: le_foll_2024
They need to be informed.
Source: le_foll_2024
He was found out.
Source: le_foll_2024
When were they arrested?
Source: le_foll_2024
Non-examples
The door was open.
Sources
- biber_1988 — Biber, Douglas (1988) : Variation across Speech and Writing
- mfte — Le Foll, Elen & Shakir, Muhammad (2023/2025) : Multi-Feature Tagger of English (MFTE) — Python version
- pybiber — Brown, David West & Reinhart, Alex (2026) : pybiber — Python package for linguistic feature extraction and Multi-Dimensional Analysis
- xiao_2009 — Xiao, Richard (2009) : Multidimensional analysis and the study of world Englishes
- bohmann_2019 — Bohmann, Axel (2019) : Variation in English Worldwide: Varieties and Genres in a Quantitative Perspective
Notes
D5 loading .43. MFTE merges with by-passives (PASSBY). Agentless passives suppress the agent, making prose more abstract and impersonal.