Academic literature on the topic 'Third-Person Passive Voice'

Verbs in Gothic are thematic, athematic, or preterite present. Several classes, including modals, are discussed. Strong verbs have seven classes, weak verbs four. Inflectional categories are first, second, and third person, singular, dual (except in the third person), and plural number. Tenses are nonpast and past/preterite. There are two inflected moods, indicative and optative, and two voices (active, passive). The passive is synthetic in the nonpast indicative and optative. The past system features two periphrastic passives, one stative-eventive with wisan (be), the other inchoative and change of state with wairþan (become). Middle functions are mostly represented by simple reflexive structures and -nan verbs. Nonfinite categories include one voice-underspecified infinitive, a nonpast and past participle, and a present active imperative. The third person imperative is normally expressed by an optative.

You open an issue of a modem chemical periodical, say the important German Angewandte Chemie or the Journal of the American Chemical Society, and what do you see? Riches upon riches: reports of new discoveries, marvelous molecules, unmakeable, unthinkable yesterday—made today, reproducibly, with ease. The chemist reads of the incredible properties of novel high-temperature superconductors, organic ferromagnets, and supercritical solvents. New techniques of measurement, quickly equipped with acronyms—EXAFS, INEPT, COCONOESY—allow you to puzzle out more expeditiously the structure of what you make. Information just flows. No matter if it’s in German, if it’s in English. It’s chemistry—communicated, exciting, alive. Let’s, however, take another perspective. To the pages of the same journal turns a humanist, a perceptive, intelligent observer who has grappled with Shakespeare, Pushkin, Joyce, and Paul Celan. I have in mind a person who is interested in what is being written, and also in how and why it is written. My observer notes in the journal short articles, a page to ten pages in length. She notes an abundance of references, trappings familiar to literary scholars, but perhaps in greater density (number of references per line of text) than in scholarly texts in the humanities. She sees a large proportion of the printed page devoted to drawings. Often these seem to be pictures of molecules, yet they are curiously iconic, lacking complete atom designations. The chemist’s representations are not isometric projections, nor real perspective drawings, yet they are partially three-dimensional. My curious observer reads the text, perhaps defocusing from the jargon, perhaps penetrating it with the help of a chemist friend. She notes a ritual form. The first sentences often begin: “The structure, bonding and spectroscopy of molecules of type X have been subjects of intense interest.a-z” There is general use of the third person and a passive voice. She finds few overtly expressed personal motivations, and few accounts of historical development. Here and there in the neutered language she glimpses stated claims of achievement or priority—“a novel metabolite,” “the first synthesis,” “a general strategy,” “parameter-free calculations.”