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I came across this passive sentence:

(1) B was thought [___ to admire C.]

The active counterpart would be (which to me sounds ungrammatical):

(2) ?A thought [B to admire C.]
(The analogous finite clause would be: A thought [(that) B admired C].)

(In case it is not clear: "A" is doing the thinking and is the subject of the active matrix clause in (2). "B" is doing the admiring and is the subject of the embedded clause in (2) and the subject of the passive matrix clause in (1), with "___" being the position emptied by "B" after having moved to the subject position of the passive matrix clause.)

My questions are:

  1. Is (2) definitely ungrammatical?
  2. If so, why? What explains it being ungrammatical while the passive is grammatical? There would presumably be a constraint on the active verb, but (a) what is it and (b) why is it no longer applicable in the passive?
  3. Is the above a rarity? To put in another way, how common are passive sentences with no active counterpart in English?
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  • Related to an extent: the passive that begins with 'It is thought...'.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Oct 3 at 22:54
  • "A thinks that B admires C"
    – Barmar
    Commented Oct 3 at 23:17
  • Are the underscores in the passive sentence supposed to be "by A"? If not, where does A come from? When you just say "B is thought", it means that people in general think it, not someone specific.
    – Barmar
    Commented Oct 3 at 23:19
  • Active: People think B admires C. Passive: B is thought to admire C. Active + Passive: People think C is admired by B. Passive + Passive: C is thought to be admired by B.
    – Tinfoil Hat
    Commented Oct 4 at 15:34
  • B was thought by many [___ to admire C.] Many thought B admired C.
    – Lambie
    Commented Oct 5 at 14:46

3 Answers 3

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According to CGEL, there are a number of "verbs of cognition or saying" that work this way (pp. 1233-1234). Specifically: they can be used with an object and an infinitive in the active voice ("They believe her to be wise"), but the usage with an infinitive is found much more often in the passive voice ("She is believed to be wise"). All such verbs (except for one sense of tip found in British English) can be used with a finite complement instead, so in the active voice "They believe that she is wise" would be the more common choice.

CGEL notes that there are three verbs in this class that can only be used in the passive voice: rumor, say, and repute. For example, "She is reputed to be wise" is fine, but *"They reputed her to be wise" is not. They don't put think in that list, presumably because "They think her to be wise" is, while awkward and unusual, not necessarily wrong. Certainly you can find attestations of that use, as in this New York Times article: "His death has shocked [...] the legions of fans who had thought him to be otherworldly and invincible."

CGEL lists the following words as belonging to that class in at least one sense: accept, affirm, allege, announce, argue, ascertain, assert, assume, attest, believe, certify, concede, conceive, conclude, conjecture, consider, declare, deduce, deem, demonstrate, discern, disclose, discover, establish, estimate, fear, find, gather, grant, guarantee, guess, hold, imagine, intuit, judge, know, note, presume, presuppose, proclaim, pronounce, prove, recognize, represent, repute, reveal, rule, rumor, say, show, state, stipulate, suppose, surmise, suspect, take, think, tip, understand, verify. Obviously these vary quite widely in the acceptability of using them with an infinitive in the active voice.

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    Skip the unnecessary to be and you have the unremarkable They believe/think/consider her wise and She is believed/thought/considered wise.
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented Oct 4 at 0:17
  • @tchrist Indeed; many of these can also be used with predicative complements (in CGEL's terminology) without issue. Of course, if the verb isn't to be that strategy won't work as well.
    – alphabet
    Commented Oct 4 at 0:37
  • It's ok with "to be" but seems tricky with other infinitives. Considering "she is believed to know the meaning of life"/"They believe her to know the meaning of life" the latter is awkward but not obviously ungrammatical to me. OTOH, in "The female mantis is believed to kill her mate after sex"/"They believe her to kill her mate after sex", the former is OK but the latter does not sound right. Maybe it's a stative vs dynamic verb thing.
    – Stuart F
    Commented Oct 4 at 11:35
  • @tchrist In case of the verb think, "B" (the direct object) should be a pronoun in order for your construction to work.
    – JK2
    Commented Oct 6 at 3:13
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Your question is based on an assumption that passives are made from actives and/or vice versa. Nothing could be further from the truth. A certain active/passive "counterpart" to a legitimate passive/active is awkward simply because such a counterpart is not in use in Present-day English. It might have been in use in a previous English or could be in use in a future English.

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  • My premise isn't that the passive is derived from the active (although I am interested in why you say "Nothing could be further from the truth.") It is a fact that most active sentences with a transitive verb have a passive counterpart. (Call it a "systematic correspondence", if you will, after Quirk et al p. 57.) My premise is that the generative process is therefore capable of producing the active and passive from the same verb. Pinker et al proposed a constraint on producing the passive. I asked if there was a known constraint on producing the active.
    – ishtar
    Commented Oct 6 at 19:44
  • Before you keep digging into books and papers, why don't you stop to consider whether what grammarians call 'systematic correspondence' accurately reflects linguistic reality, or if it's an artificial construct imposed on the natural messiness of English. By "the truth" I mean linguistic reality or the natural messiness of English.
    – JK2
    Commented Oct 7 at 1:25
  • I'm not sure where you're trying to go with this. Are you saying that the statement "most active sentences with a transitive verb have a passive counterpart" conflicts with reality?
    – ishtar
    Commented Oct 7 at 16:58
  • No, that's not what I'm saying. The statement does reflect reality. Most (not all) active sentences with a transitive verb have a passive counterpart", so some active sentences with a transitive verb don't. And OP's example (2) is simply an example of some active sentences with a transitive verb that don't have a passive counterpart. So why are you asking why (2) doesn't have a passive counterpart?
    – JK2
    Commented Oct 8 at 2:38
  • That's not what I'm asking, but never mind. The question should be: Why are you saying I can't ask why? You seem to have decided that the active-passive opposition is an axiom beyond which no one need look, and in fact asking questions should be prohibited.
    – ishtar
    Commented Oct 8 at 21:21
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I came across this passive sentence:

(1) B was thought [___ to admire C.]

The active counterpart would be (which to me sounds ungrammatical):

Passives can have an implied agent. In fact, the active counterpart would be

"They/people [or some other contextual subject/agent] thought that B admired C".

A passive clause is

He (patient) was eaten by a tiger (agent)

and the active version is

A tiger (agent) ate him (patient).

as above, it is not always necessary to state the agent if the agent is not known or is not essential to understanding:

"The body was never found - it had, almost certainly, been eaten."

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