Comparative Study of Czech and English Passive Voice in ESP

Abstract

Passive voice can be defined as a construction in which the object of a verb appears in the position of a subject. English and Czech share the basic structure in the formation of passive. The aim of the article is to analyse the occurrence of passive constructions in technical articles available online and thus confirm the assumption of the existence of negative influence of language interference on the acquisition of the passive voice for Czech ESP students as well to point out the necessity to include passive voice in the curriculum of ESP. In order to get the basic data, twenty online articles, ten in Czech, ten in English, on the topic related to mechanical engineering were selected. For the data collection, the AntConc software version 3.4 was used. The data gathered were subsequently analysed and compared to confirm the hypothesis of higher frequency of using passive voice in English technical texts and thus to emphasize the importance of studying and teaching passive voice within ESP.

Keywords

• Active voice
• Passive voice
• agent
• ESP (English for Specific Purposes)
• EST (English for Science and Technology)