by Max Wheeler
Sí, senyor: és pintat meu. Yes, indeed: it was painted by me.
The use of de to introduce passive agents may be extended to almost any verb in Balearic.
Aquest diari és llegit de molta de gent.
This newspaper is read by many people.
The phrase per part de ‘on the part of’ (note: not de part de ‘on behalf of’) can indicate the agent in impersonal constructions and is occasionally found with the passive:
l’ús que avui es fa per part de molts d’aquest mot
the use made by many people nowadays of this word
Aquesta mesura ha estat durament criticada per part del rector.
This measure has been strongly criticized by/on the part of the vice-chancellor.
29.1.3 USE OF THE PASSIVE
Some general observations provide the basis for good practice:
(i) English allows great latitude in use of the passive voice, to the extent that an indirect object or a prepositional object can appear as the subject of a passive construction: ‘I was lent another copy’, ‘They have been brought good news’, ‘We’ll soon be told the answer’, ‘It is not to be wondered at’, ‘They could be caught sight of’. Word-for-word translation into Catalan of this kind of sentence produces grotesquely alien results. The examples just given might be translated respectively as Em van deixar un altre exemplar, Han rebut una bona notícia, Aviat se’ns dirà la solució, No se n’ha d’estranyar, S’albiraven.
(ii) The passive with ser is, in general, more characteristic of (and more appropriate to) formal language. In ordinary speech and in informal written styles passive avoidance (see 29.1.4) tends to operate. The following pairs of sentences are virtually equivalent in meaning, but recourse to either the impersonal es or impersonal ‘they’ is generally more spontaneous.
Moltes fàbriques han estat tancades. = S’han tancat moltes fàbriques.
Many factories have been closed down.
El veredicte serà anunciat abans de mitjanit. = Anunciaran el veredicte abans de mitjanit.
The verdict will be announced before midnight.
(iii) A general reluctance to ‘think passive’ is a feature of Catalan as it is of other Romance languages. However, this is not to say that the passive voice lacks vitality in the modern language. Indeed a certain increase in its use may be detected. This could be due, in part, to the successful influence, through Catalan-language education, of the old-school prescriptivists who have promoted the passive, at the expense of impersonal es, in order to enrich the expressive possibilities of Catalan, and also, it must be said, to mark the distance between it and Spanish. The phenomenon has been particularly observable in the language of journalism, where imitation of English-language sources and models may be influential. This tendency has perhaps been more recently accentuated by insensitive calquing in dubbed versions of English-language film and television materials. Catalans are perhaps more likely to come out with Serà renyat pel seu pare than El seu pare el renyarà if they have in view or in mind the example of ‘He’ll be told off by his father’. Similarly with:
Ha estat operada per un metge de Barcelona. = Un metge de Barcelona li ha fet l’operació.
She was operated on by a Barcelona doctor.
By grammatical criteria, the alternatives considered so far in this section are all perfectly acceptable in standard Catalan. The question becomes one of how frequently the passive would be spontaneously generated by an educated user, and in which contexts. The general answer is clearly: less frequently than the passive would be used by an English-speaking counterpart, and in a more restricted range of contexts.
(iv) The long passive with the agent expressed does perform a specific function for which alternatives are relatively less practicable:
La bandera era portada per un desconegut.
The flag was carried by a stranger.
Sempre que els pobles han estat ferits pel llamp de la guerra, vencedors i vençuts han hagut de travessar períodes calamitosos.
Whenever communities have been struck by the thunderbolt of war, both victors and vanquished have had to live through calamitous times.
Introduction of the agent with per in an impersonal es construction is also encountered, but it tends to be disapproved of by normative grammarians.
Aquesta versió s’ha difós per certs periodistes.
This version has been spread by some journalists.
(cf. Aquesta versió ha estat difosa per certs periodistes.)
The short passive, however, does give a lot of ground to impersonal es:
la possibilitat que forces alemanyes es despleguen a Bòsnia (El Temps)
la possibilitat que forces alemanyes siguen desplegades a Bòsnia
the possibility of German forces being deployed in Bosnia
There is certainly a case for recommending use of the passive rather than impersonal es in cases (including the last one above) where ambiguity might arise because a true reflexive meaning might be construed, for example:
Les dues rodes dentades han estat separades/s’han separat.
The two cogs have been disengaged/have disengaged themselves.
(v) The passive operates much more comfortably with the preterite, future, perfect, and pluperfect tenses and with the infinitive than with the present, imperfect, and continuous tenses (that is, the forms that characteristically express imperfective aspect).
Van ser/Seran detinguts per la policia.
They were/will be arrested by the police.
The options above are appropriate in a wide range of contexts whereas Eren/Són detinguts would require special contextual conditions. Similarly:
El monument serà restaurat/ha de ser restaurat per l’ajuntament.
The monument will be/is to be restored by the municipal authorities.
Most informants, however, feel that El monument està sent restaurat … ‘… is being restored’ sounds unnatural, preferring for this and other imperfective senses to use impersonal es, or, where the agent is mentioned, an active sentence, either L’ajuntament està restaurant el monument, or, with topicalization, El monument, l’està restaurant l’ajuntament (36.4).
The loose distinction between verbs which are themselves inherently ‘perfective’ (punctual, events) and those which are inherently ‘imperfective’ or durational (states) in meaning also affects this issue. Subject to the tense constraints just mentioned, the passive is more likely with the former than with the latter. Thus Llurs paraules són escoltades ‘Their words are listened to’ is more acceptable than Llurs paraules són sentides ‘Their words are heard’. Verbs like abandonar ‘abandon’, aprovar ‘approve (of)’, formar ‘form’, reservar ‘reserve’, atribuir ‘attribute’, etc., occupy an area where the event/state distinction is blurred, so that the nuance of aspect is what is prominent in the following alternatives:
Una quarta part del pressupost fou/era atribuïda al nou departament.
Α quarter of the budget was allocated to the new department.
La instrucció va ser/era aprovada pel ministre.
The instruction was approved by the minister.
An important treatise on this subject, basically defining the limitations on the use of the passive, provocatively begins:
És ben sabut que … (J. Solà) It is well known that…
(vi) The relationship between the true passive (El poble va ser abandonat pels habitants ‘The town was abandoned by its inhabitants’) and adjectival past participle constructions with ser and estar (El poble era/estava abandonat ‘The town was deserted’) is discussed at 21.1 and 30.5.1–2.
29.1.4 CONSTRAINTS ON THE PASSIVE, ALTERNATIVE STRATAGEMS, THEMATIZATION
Rather than to attempt an inventory of verbs and contexts which do not admit passivization with ser, it is preferable to establish some guidelines for authentic use in the light of the preceding sections. The guidelines can be related to (i) frequency, and (ii) focus.
(i) English latitude with the passive accounts for the greater frequ
ency of this form in any substantial text or utterance in English compared with the natural equivalent text or utterance in Catalan. (The frequency principle applies inversely, of course, in translation from Catalan to English, where one would expect to find the passive rendering various non-passive constructions in the Catalan original.) The point can be well illustrated by taking a sentence from George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia: ‘The place was raided and Thompson was arrested, flung into jail, and kept for eight days in a cell so full of people that nobody had room to lie down.’ The stringing together of four passives (‘ … raided, … arrested, … flung, … kept’) and the elliptical subordination of the last two participles to the ‘was’ of ‘was arrested’ are perfectly natural and unobtrusive in English. The same sequence of actions would almost certainly be cast quite differently by a Catalan speaker, especially as ‘the place’ referred to is described in the preceding sentence as ‘a hotel in a part of the town controlled by the Civil Guards’. Thus the opening clause would best be rendered as Van assaltar el local … (where the subject could be construed as either impersonal ‘they’ or ‘the Civil Guards’). Then, if the passive fou detingut were employed for the central ‘was arrested’, as is feasible, the elliptical additions ‘flung’ and ‘kept’ might be expressed in an alternative construction, probably reverting to impersonal ‘they’, with the punctuation and the connective appropriately modified: Van assaltar el local i Thompson fou detingut; el ficaren a la presó on el van tenir tancat durant vuit dies en una cel·la tan plena de presos …
In other contexts, the constraints on the Catalan passive may be grammatical in nature. Fou insultada pel seu marit is feasible for ‘She was insulted by her husband’ (although not more so than the active El seu marit la va insultar, or indeed La va insultar el seu marit), while an active form, El seu marit la insultava or La insultava el seu marit, would invariably be preferred to *Era insultada pel seu marit. ‘She was beaten by her husband’ will be active, both in the preterite and the imperfect, Li va pegar/Li pegava el seu marit, because pegar takes an indirect object. Elsewhere, such constraints may often appear quite arbitrary. One can say L’edifici fou enderrocat per una bomba ‘The building was demolished by a bomb’, but more rarely La finestra fou trencada per una pedra, which would probably be turned into a sentence like Van trencar la finestra d’una pedrada ‘The window was broken by a stone(throw)’. The passive may prove unacceptable with a personal pronoun, but acceptable with other types of agent: Era envejada per tothom ‘She was envied by everyone’, but not ?Era envejada per mi ‘She was envied by me’ (Jo l’envejava). The following are sentences of a type where the passive is the readiest option in English but most unlikely (or incorrect) in Catalan:
Aquest gos m’ha mossegat. I’ve been bitten by this dog.
No t’irrita la seva actitud? Aren’t you irritated by their attitude?
La instrueix un professional. She is coached by a professional.
(ii) One function of the passive is to ‘thematize’ or focus attention on the object of the verbal action by situating it at the beginning of the clause (see Chapter 36, especially 36.3–4). English word order is restricted in its possibilities to achieve this effect other than via the passive. Catalan, on the other hand, has various alternative ways of achieving this thematization of the transitive object. The constructions described in (a)-(f) below can thus be considered as stratagems for passive avoidance (although this notion corresponds to the perspective of the foreign learner and not to the instincts of the native speaker).
(a) The simplest of these is to keep the sentence in the active form (as in the last examples given above), with postposing of the subject as appropriate. This construction can entail representation of the underlying object in the form of a clitic pronoun.
Vaig trucar a la porta. La va obrir un noi d’uns dotze anys.
I knocked at the door. It was opened by a boy of about twelve.
(b) The same effect can be obtained when a noun object is present. Catalan norms of word order (see 36.4) allow the object to stand first in the sentence (left detachment), preceding the verb, in which case the object will be doubled by a redundant clitic object pronoun:
Aquests paquets, els haurem de portar demà a correus.
These parcels will have to be posted (by us) tomorrow.
Tot això, ja els ho havien explicat abans.
They had already been told all that before.
(c) The last examples in (i) above and those just given in (ii (a)) and (ii (b)) illustrate a recurrent feature which is readily converted into a guideline for good practice. That is, simply to ‘think active’. Very many spontaneous passive constructions in English are equally as spontaneous in the Catalan active form. Again the possibilities of verb-subject inversion in Catalan (see 36.2) facilitate matters:
Ho va descobrir un investigador belga.
It was discovered by a Belgian researcher.
Un mocador li cobria les espatlles.
Her shoulders were covered by a shawl.
(d) As already illustrated at several points above, use of impersonal ‘they’ in Catalan often corresponds to an English passive:
Li van denegar l’autorització. He was refused permission.
T’han estafat. You’ve been swindled.
(e) A pseudo-passive with veure’s, trobar-se, or quedar will often replace ser with the participle:
Tot el país s’ha vist sacsejat per vents fortissims. (El Temps)
The whole country has been buffeted by extremely strong winds.
El debat parlamentari ha quedat superat pel debat al carrer. (El Temps)
Parliamentary debate has given way to debate on the streets.
Es troba empantanegada en falsos problemes.
She’s got bogged down in false problems.
(f) Notwithstanding the naturalness and frequency of the constructions covered in (a-e) above, the passive with impersonal es is the most consistently deployed alternative to the passive with ser:
No se li pot demanar més.
He can’t be asked for more
Això s’ha descrit com la seva proesa més heroica.
This has been described as his most heroic feat.
29.2 IMPERSONAL USES OF ES
The impersonal use of es is also referred to, for historical reasons, as the reflexive passive. The es in question is the third-person reflexive clitic (whose spelling, es, s’, -se, ’s, is affected by the position and spelling of the verb, as described in 12.1.2).
The reflexive passive has been introduced in 23.4, in relation to reflexivity, and its relationship with the true passive (ser + participle) is focused on above at several points. The basic observation that a sentence like Es van plantejar moltes qüestions is bound by common sense to mean ‘Many questions were raised’, rather than ‘Many questions raised themselves’, is a good point from which to complete description of this phenomenon.
Catalan, like Spanish, has gone further than French in allowing impersonal es constructions with intransitive verbs. Sentences like S’hi està bé, aquí ‘One feels fine here/It’s nice here’ or S’és major d’edat als 18 anys ‘One attains the age of majority at 18’ obviously cannot be directly rendered by the passive (any more than by a literally reflexive construction). Natives tend to perceive the construction in S’hi està bé, aquí as basically different from that in Es van plantejar moltes qüestions, and they may reserve the term ‘impersonal es’ for the former and ‘passive es’ or ‘reflexive passive’ for the latter. The distinction, however, is less important to the foreign learner of Catalan than the observation that in either construction es appears to behave (because of its position – tending to begin the sentence – and because of its function in the cognitive meaning of the sentence) as the subject of the verb. This is relevant to: general structural behaviour, questions of overlap with other constructions (other equivalents of ‘one’ as subject, see 29.3), and questions of agreement in number (S’ha construït molts xalets vs. S’han c
onstruït molts xalets; see 29.2.2).
Further examples of impersonal uses of es:
Es veu que no vindran.
It looks as if they won’t be coming.
El pollastre tallat a quarts …, se sala i es posa a fregir amb una mica d’oli.
(from cookery book by Ε. Millà)
The chicken, which has been cut into quarters … is seasoned and then fried in a little oil.
Es reparen rellotges.
Watches repaired.
Se sentia un soroll estrany.
A strange sound could be heard.
Es van produir més de cent avaries elèctriques en poques hores.
Over a hundred breakdowns in electricity supply occurred in a few hours.
On word order with impersonal constructions, see 36.2.
29.2.1 IMPERSONAL ES AND ALTERNATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS
Listening to any Catalan speech or perusal of any substantial written text will attest the frequency of impersonal es. Some constraints on its use are nevertheless to be observed. These correspond to (i) grammatical and (ii) stylistic considerations. In both areas one may detect influence of (or contrasts with) Spanish whose speakers are, on the whole, more elastic in using its equivalent and have gone further in seeing se as a subject pronoun.
(i) Grammatical constraints
(a) Impersonal es is incompatible with verbs that are themselves reflexive or pronominal (Chapter 23); it can neither coexist with nor supplant pronominal es. Thus we can say S’hi dorm molt bé en aquest llit ‘One sleeps very well in this bed’/‘This is a very comfortable bed’, but not (with llevar-se ‘get up’) *Es lleva d’hora nor *Es es lleva d’hora for ‘One gets up early’ (Es lleva d’hora can mean only ‘She/He gets up early’). Impersonal expressions with reflexive or pronominal verbs have to be formed with un/-a, (un) hom, as described in 29.3.