Word.ws English Dictionary

pseudo-passive

pseudo-passive is the alternative spelling of pseudopassive.

Meaning of pseudopassive

Noun

pseudopassive (plural pseudopassives)

  1. A construction where the object of a preposition has been promoted to the role of subject, as in The problem was talked about.
    • Consider the English pseudo-passive in (4). (4) This bed has not been slept in for many years1991, Reineke Bok-Bennema, Case and Agreement in Inuit, Berlin: Foris, →ISBN, page 97
  2. A construction that removes the subject from an intransitive verb, as in the Dutch sentence Er wordt gefloten ("[Someone] whistled").
    • Consider now the pseudo-passive, Er werd gefloten "There was whistling." Here, just as in the true passive, the morphology asserts high participant not focussed.1976, Robert Kirsner, “On the subjectless 'pseudo-passive' in Standard Dutch and the semantics of background agents”, in Charles N. Li, editor, Subject and Topic, New York: Academic Press, →OCLC...

See all 5 meanings of pseudopassive

Forms of pseudo-passive

pluralpseudo-passives

Origin of pseudo-passive

From pseudo- + passive.

Questions about pseudo-passive

What is pseudo-passive the alternative spelling of?
Pseudo-passive is the alternative spelling of pseudopassive.

Words near pseudo-passive in the dictionary

  1. pseudo-octave
  2. pseudo-octaves
  3. pseudo-organizational
  4. pseudo-participial
  5. pseudo-participials
  6. pseudo-passive
  7. pseudo-passives
  8. pseudo-penannular
  9. pseudo-penes
  10. pseudo-penis
  11. pseudo-penises

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pseudo-passive (page history and authors); pseudopassive (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-pseudo-passive.wav.

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