A New Look at Noam Chomsky’s Theory of Grammatical Voice

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to argue that there are serious flaws with Noam Chomsky’s theory of grammatical voice which has become the general consensus in modern linguistics. Our arguments are based on evidence taken from the language spoken by the
majority members of the Nacirema tribe in North America and differs substantially from English as depicted in the linguistic literature. The passive sentence itself has two different meanings, only one of which is the same as in the active sentence. Indefinite agents are not deleted in passive constructions. There are active sentences which have two distinct corresponding passive sentences all three of which have the very same meaning and form of the verb. In order for passive morphology to alter the grammatical status of the active’s subject and object, it must be added to the active form of the verb, since without the active form of the verb there are no subjects and objects whose grammatical status can be altered.