Learn English – the difference between present passive voice and present perfect passive voice

middle-voicepassive-voicepresent-perfect

What is the difference in term of meaning between these:
The order has shipped, that means you will receive it soon and it is shipped. Does it mean the same thing ?

Best Answer

Let's start by cleaning up your terminology:

  1. Present perfect passive: The order has been shipped.
  2. Present perfect active: The order has shipped.
  3. Present passive: The order is shipped.

These all have essentially the same meaning: somebody has packaged your order and put it in the mail or on a truck to be delivered to you.

The important difference between them is that

  • in 1, the verb ship is transitive. The order is the 'Patient' of the verb, the entity which undergoes the action. Its ordinary active-voice form would require that the 'Agent', the entity which performs the action, be named and act as Subject of the sentence, with the Patient, the order, acting as Direct Object:

    Agent/SubjectWe  VbPrPfActhave shipped  Patient/DirObjthe order.

    When this sentence is cast in the passive voice with a BE+PaPpl construction, the Patient becomes the Subject and the Agent is omitted or expressed with a by phrase:

    Patient/SubjectThe order  VbPrPfPasshas been shipped  (Agent/PrepPhrby us).

  • in 2, the verb ship is intransitive. It is in effect a different verb, which represents shipping as an action performed by the Subject, and there is no Patient.

    Agent/SubjectThe order  VbPrPfActivehas shipped.

    This sort of construction, in which the Patient of the action is 'transformed' into its Agent, is sometimes called middle voice, because it expresses a semantic relationship between the verb and the Subject which lies somewhere 'between' active and passive voice. It is fairly common with verbs like wash and shave, where it has a reflexive sense: John shaves (himself), Cathy washed (herself); it also occurs idiomatically with verbs like cook and drive:

    A stew was cooking on the stove.
    Toyota's new suspension drives very well.

  • in 3, the verb has the form of a simple present passive; but I think most native speakers would understand this as a predication: the Subject, the order acts as the 'Topic', the verb is the copula is, and shipped is an adjectival Predicate Complement describing the status of the order.

    Topic/SubjectThe order  VbPrCopulais  PredComp{shipped / delayed / pending / in transit / complete}.

In this context, there's really no reason to prefer any of these over the others. In other contexts, however, your choice might be significant. These two sentences, for instance, have quite different meanings:

The new Toyota drives well. This is a statement about the quality of the car.
John drives the new Toyota well. This is a statement about John's ability as a driver.

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