The passive voice in political speeches: a corpus-driven study

Although the passive voice is extensively covered in grammar books, some structures are regarded as a stumbling block for students, mainly those where a straightforward Italian equivalent is missing. Starting from the assumption that whatever is discovered to deviate significantly from native-speaker usage should be prioritized in the classroom (Nesselhauf 2004), the emphasis of this paper shall not be on structures where a perfect Italian counterpart is available, e.g. No one at the Justice Department was suggesting that torture is allowed, or Money has been allocated to local schools, but on structures such as It is said that when the United States sneezes, the United Kingdom catches cold and the north-east of England gets pneumonia, or The EU is the most effective way that Britain can make its voice heard on global issues, or Progress is being made in Iraq. This last structure, where the English verb is marked for combination of aspect and voice, that is when the perfect aspect, and particularly the progressive aspect, occur together with the passive voice in various combinations, causes quite a few problems to Italian learners. The perfect aspect is fairly common in Italian too, whereas the progressive passive is missing altogether; thus when students have to deal with a sentence such as In the meantime all these innocent people are being killed and the country is being destroyed, they inevitably tend to associate it with the closest of the structures they are familiar with, i.e. the perfect aspect: In the meantime all these innocent people have been killed and the country has been destroyed. The difficulty, then, lies in the translation of this structure, hence on the proactive use of it, which students, understandably, tend to avoid. In their groundbreaking grammar based entirely on authentic language, Biber et al. (1999) maintain that today voice and aspect combinations are possible but, in actual usage, the perfect passive is only moderately common, while the progressive aspect is rare. It is probably for this reason that the structure remains almost unexplored in traditional course books. Yet, many instances were found in ABC, the spoken political corpus we rely on in our classes that includes, at the time of writing, 14 million words, as uttered by American and British politicians. This paper attempts to show, that even though authenticity in the classroom is still a controversial topic among linguists and didacticians (Römer 2004), it is worth bringing into the classroom real and attested language: it is “an absurd notion that invented examples can actually represent the language better than real ones” (Sinclair 1991), as well as “just nonsense” from a semantic point of view (Firth 1957). What is argued here is that natural language should form the basis of our teaching rather than invented and contrived examples, given that more often than not what we tend to find in textbooks is a simplified, non-authentic English. Thus, along with Berry (1999), it is easy to get facts wrong when the rights ones are not available