ABSTRACT
Short passives constitute between seventy and eighty percent of passives in large corpora of texts. The use of the short passive can be classified in terms of the reasons for omitting the agent. Of course, particular types of language use reveal different proportions of short to long passives, and indeed of passives to non-passives. Passives in general, and long passives in particular, are relatively infrequent in imaginative, prose (novels, etc.) and in informal conversation, while informative prose and planned academic conversation contain a higher proportion of both passives in general and long passives in particular. In many languages other than English, passive-like constructions are 'deviant' in the sense that their use is highly restricted and infrequent. It should be intuitively clear that the active and passive variants are not typically used in exactly the same ways, and that it makes sense to talk about the variants as being determined by several factors.
