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Doesn't this change the meaning of the sentence, though? I learned this in school as the 'active voice' and the 'passive voice'. My understanding is that when y
by cryptoz 8y ago
Doesn't this change the meaning of the sentence, though? I learned this in school as the 'active voice' and the 'passive voice'. My understanding is that when you change nouns to verbs and vice versa you are also changing the meaning of the sentence.
How can this research be done, then? Since the two sentences mean entirely different things, obviously people will react differently to them - they are not interchangeable, they have specific and different meanings!
"I support the division..."
and
"I support dividing..."
mean entirely different things. The first one is passive and indicates that the speaker/author is outside of the decision to divide\ and possible outside of the area itself.
The second one is active and implies that the speaker is going to be involved in the dividing activity itself.
Obviously the words will get different reactions from people because they mean different things. Without additional tests to query what the population understood the sentence to mean, along with how they feel about it, would make sense.
But as it is, this is like finding out that people react differently to "let's use fire" vs "lets use a blanket". They are totally different things.
- mikybee93 8y agoNot quite. I could say "I support colonizing mars" and "I support the colonization of mars" and those both mean the same thing, don't they? I'm not actively participating in either of those acts, am I? I think a lot of it is implicit and context based. And maybe it's even based on personal interpretation, but even in your examples, I see those two sentences meaning the same thing.
- karmelapple 8y ago"I support the division..." and "I support dividing..." both indicate support for the act of dividing, whether you have the authority of decide on whether or not the division is happening. If I'm at a birthday party and there's one piece of cake left but three people still hungry, I could say "I support the division of the piece of cake" or "I support dividing the piece of cake" even if the person celebrating the birthday is the ultimate authority on whether we will divide the cake. I'd convey the same idea, just with slightly different words, and likely different intonation, too.
- conistonwater 8y agoThat is definitely not what active voice and passive voice mean, they are relatively precise terms in linguistics, see for example Fear and Loathing of the English Passive by Geoffrey Pullum (http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.pdf http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.pdf). Both I support the division... and I support dividing... are in active voice.
- brain5ide 8y ago"The division is supported by me" would be an actual passive.
- conistonwater 8y agoThat doesn't sound grammatical to me, it doesn't sound like the sort of thing anybody would even try to say. I think it violates the rule that Pullum discusses in 2.4.2 p.8 (new-information condition) in that link.