In newspaper headlines, editors tend to leave out as many words as possible for space-economical reasons. It also helps readers to read the headlines very quickly to rouse their interest in reading the rest of the article.
So "A man was robbed while he was sitting at home" becomes:
Man Robbed At Home
Some standard parts of sentences that are left out of headlines are:
- articles (a man -> man)
- auxiliary verbs (a man was slapped -> man slapped)
- copulative "be": (the new major is very happy -> New Major Very Happy)
There are many more, and it can be an interesting exercise to try and reconstruct a complete, correct sentence out of condensed headlines :)
Although a bit of ambiguity is not bad for a headline (it helps attract attention), in this case I do not see ambiguity.
If slapped was meant as an active verb, I would have expected the object to be mentioned - otherwise it makes no sense.
"A man slapped his neighbour" would become "Man Slapped Neighbour", not "Man Slapped Visiting Neighbours House".
For a headline like "Company Sued for Millions", I also see little confusion: if it is the company doing the suing, it is only news while the case is ongoing, so it would be "Company Sues For Millions"
You said "if we use the agent, the sentence becomes passive voice". I have to disagree. In every one of your examples, the subject of the verb is the patient of the action. Regardless of whether the agent is mentioned, those statements employ the passive voice.
You're asking how to distinguish something that doesn't need to be distinguished. The question of passive vs. active voice is completely different than the question of stative vs. dynamic verbs -- in the same way that the question of how curly your hair is happens to be completely different than the question of how dark your hair is.
In an active voice construction, the subject causes the action. In a passive voice construction, the subject receives the action. It's easy to see that all of your sentences are passive voice constructions because its easy to find the active voice equivalents:
Someone parked the car.
Something increased your work volume.
Someone arrested him.
and so on.
Although the stative vs. dynamic distinction exists in English semantics, it isn't present in English grammar. One rule of thumb is that stative verbs do not work well when employing the continuous aspect. For example, "I am knowing the answer" is a poorly-formed sentence because the verb to know is stative. It seems that every one of your passive voice examples uses a dynamic verb.
One car was being parked outside the gate when I left.
Your work volume is being increased during the holidays.
He was being arrested while I calmly walked away.
and so on.
A stative verb can be used in either the active or the passive voice:
My manager knows me to be an excellent employee.
I am known to be an excellent employee.
A dynamic verb can be used in either the active or the passive voice:
I parked the car outside the gate.
The car was parked outside the gate.
So, how do you distinguish between passive and stative? You don't. You distinguish between active and passive. You distinguish between dynamic and stative. You do those two things separately. They are not related to each other.
Now, as to your follow-up question, let's use the dynamic verb to park in the passive voice and indicative mode:
The car was parked -- past tense, indefinite aspect
The car is parked -- present tense, indefinite aspect
The car will be parked -- future tense, indefinite aspect
The car had been parked -- past tense, perfect aspect
The car has been parked -- present tense, perfect aspect
The car will have been parked -- future tense, perfect aspect
Does the meaning change? Yes. Aspect carries a different kind of meaning than tense, but both aspect and tense carry meaning. Tense has to do with location in time. Aspect has to do with a relationship with time. Often tense and aspect are taught as a single, combined thing, but I find them easier to understand when they are examined as separate properties.
Changing the aspect does not change the tense. Changing the aspect does not change the voice. Changing the aspect does not change the nature of the verb, whether stative or dynamic.
Because the perfect aspect has an explicit relationship with time, it makes the most sense when the time frame is also made explicit, as in "The car has been parked there for several weeks" or "The car had been parked there for a month before anyone noticed it."
Whether a verb is stative or dynamic has very little impact on English grammar. Certain verb forms don't make sense for stative verbs, and that's about it. The properties of voice, tense, aspect and mode have a great deal of impact. Changing any one of those requires changing something about the verb's form.
Let me see if I can clearly summarize all of that.
- Which of the example sentences are passive voice? All of them.
- Which of them are indicative sentences? All of them.
- Which can be interpreted as having a participial subject complement? All of them.
- Which are stative? None of them.
Most of those are unrelated items. One pair is an identity. The passive voice construction is a subset of the participial subject complement construction.
Best Answer
We normally use the passive with verbs that express the idea of agency: something done to {someone or something} by {someone or something else}.
Have, in the sense of "to be in possession of", although transitive, does not involve a doing-to, and for that reason it does not lend itself to passive expression.
On the other hand:
He bought the book
can become
The book was bought by him.
He took the book. The book was taken by him.