What does «voz pasiva» mean in Spanish?
- The passive voice is a verb construction or conjugation by which the subject is presented as passive (patient subject), while the action performed by the verb is carried out by a complement (agent complement) and not by the agent subject of the verb in the active voice. The passive voice transforms a verb from transitive to intransitive with only one possible main argument (the agent when expressed by an adjunct marked with oblique or prepositional case). The passive voice is based on a combination of the verb "ser" (never "estar") in the corresponding tense, plus the past participle of the verb we conjugate; the participle will agree in gender and number with the new subject. The subject of the active or direct sentence is now preceded by the preposition "por" and becomes what we call the agent subject.