Consider the diffrence between the two sentences below:
Today's match has been cancelled. (Present Perfect)
(Meaning: Today's match is cancelled due to any reason. This would be just an information.)Today's match has been cancelled by organiser. (Present Perfect but in passive)
(Meaning: Today's match is cancelled by organiser. It is in passive voice.)
In the first example I understand that the match was cancelled and in the second example I understand that the match was cancelled by the organiser.
Please explain and clarify it for me if I understand it incorrectly.
Best Answer
Both of these sentences are in passive voice.
To understand the active/passive contrast you must keep in mind that the semantic role and the syntactic role of the constituents are two different things.
In the active voice, the Agent (semantic role) of the verb, the entity which 'performs' the action, is represented by the subject (syntactic role) of the sentence, and the Patient (semantic role) of the verb, the entity which 'undergoes' the action, is represented by the direct object (syntactic role) of the sentence.
In the passive voice, the Patient is represented by the subject of the sentence; the verb is recast as a construction with BE + the past/passive participle; and the Agent may be either omitted or expressed as a preposition phrase headed by by. There is no direct object.
The presence or absence of a constituent identifying the Agent does not affect the voice of the sentence: it is passive whether or not the Agent is explicitly named.