Pasiv
Overview
Serbian builds the passive voice two different ways, and genuinely needs both. The participial passive combines бити with participles-b1's трпни глаголски придев: „Књига је написана.“ (The book is written/was written.) The reflexive passive instead adds the clitic се, already familiar from reflexive-verbs-a2, to an ordinary active verb: „Књига се чита.“ (The book is read/is being read.)
Both share the defining feature of any passive: the thing acted upon becomes the grammatical subject, and the doer either disappears entirely or moves into a separate phrase. Which of the two strategies to reach for depends mostly on aspect and on whether the doer needs mentioning at all - covered section by section below.
Participial passive - бити + трпни придев
This strategy simply conjugates бити in whatever tense is needed and keeps the трпни придев fixed, agreeing with the subject exactly as participles-b1 taught - present-tense је for a resultant state, ће бити for the future, била for an earlier, already-past state, all shown below.
The doer, when it needs stating, appears in a separate phrase built with од + genitive - reusing genitive-case-a2's own case, now in a new role: „Књига је написана од познатог писца.“ (The book was written by a famous writer.) Unlike the reflexive strategy below, the participial passive accepts an agent phrase comfortably.
Reflexive passive - се + active verb
The reflexive passive reuses reflexive-verbs-a2's се wholesale - same second-position placement, same clitic behavior - on an otherwise ordinary active verb: „Кућа се продаје.“ (The house is being sold / sells.) It favors imperfective verbs and general, habitual or ongoing statements far more than one-off completed events, and it can go fully impersonal with no clear grammatical subject at all: „Овде се говори енглески.“ (English is spoken here.)
In perfekat, the reflexive passive runs straight into word-order-enclitics-a2's се+је collision rule: whenever the 3rd-singular auxiliary је would land directly after се, it is simply dropped, exactly as that lesson established. „Продавница се отворила тачно у осам.“, never „…се је отворила…“.
Choosing a strategy, and what doesn't passivize at all
As a rule of thumb, reach for the reflexive се-passive for general, habitual, agentless statements, especially with imperfective verbs, and reach for the participial passive for one completed, resultant event, or whenever the doer needs stating with од. The two are not always freely interchangeable substitutes for each other.
Only transitive verbs passivize at all - participles-b1 already flagged this for the трпни придев itself, and it applies here for exactly the same reason: a verb like имати describes a relationship rather than an action done to something, so it has no natural passive in either strategy.
Tables
| Formation | Example | Typical use |
|---|---|---|
| participski (biti + trpni pridev) | Knjiga je napisana. | completed event, resultant state, agent expressible |
| povratni (se + glagol) | Knjiga se čita. | general/habitual, ongoing, usually agentless |
Examples
Compared with…
English's be-passive (the book was written) matches the participial strategy closely, agent phrase and all (by a famous writer ~ од познатог писца). The reflexive passive has no natural English counterpart whatsoever: the house sells quickly is the closest English gets, and it works for only a narrow set of verbs - English simply cannot mark agentless, ongoing passives as freely and productively as Serbian's се does. Expect to translate many се-passives into ordinary active English sentences with a vague or generic subject (they, people) rather than a matching passive.
Common mistakes
Tips & exceptions
- Reach for the reflexive се-passive for general, habitual, agentless statements (especially imperfective verbs); reach for the participial бити+трпни придев passive for one completed, resultant event or whenever the doer needs an од phrase.
- Never drop је/су in the participial passive, even in the present tense - the auxiliary is always required.
- The се+је collision rule you already know from word-order-enclitics-a2 governs reflexive-passive perfekat too - check for it whenever a 3rd-singular subject meets се.
- Some verbs essentially never appear in either passive - имати describes a relationship, not an action done to something, and has no natural трпни придев or се-passive to build from (participles-b1's own scope restriction, restated here).
- Impersonal reflexive statements like „Овде се говори енглески.“ have no clear grammatical subject standing in the way кућа does in „Кућа се продаје.“ - treat these as a fixed idiom pattern rather than expecting to find the missing subject.
- A handful of трпни придеви have drifted into an independent adjectival meaning distinct from a literal passive reading - заузет (from заузети, literally occupied/taken) now mostly just means busy describing a person, not having been occupied by someone.
Summary
Opens Focus mode: one exercise at a time, with explanations — either script accepted.
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