Owen—Relations Expressed by the Passive Voice. 79 
say, an output of energy. Further, in linguistic thinking we 
absolve ourselves from all responsibility to Physics, regularly 
looking for (an energy-creator, or) a putter-out of energy—-im¬ 
aginary only, as is further indicated, pp. 9-10. Our further 
search for what the output energy effects, or affects, is the more 
permissible that, were there no affecting or effecting, it is far 
from easy to imagine how the putting-out of energy would be 
made known to us. We accordingly conceive of action as ac¬ 
complishing some change. 
This change it will be advantageous to observe in the rela¬ 
tions which obtain between participants in action—in particu¬ 
lar the change from non-relation to relation. Thus, for in¬ 
stance, given a robin and a cherry, suppose the robin eats the 
cherry; the act may be regarded as the instituting of a pre¬ 
viously non-existent eater-to-food relation between the bird and 
the fruit. 
Each particular action institutes its own particular relation. 
In “A struck B” I find the relation of striker to victim; in 
“Brown hired Johnson,” that of employer Jo employee. Tak¬ 
ing a hint from the suggestive suffixes occurring in “employer” 
and “employee,” I group relations of this type—especially in¬ 
structive in the study of the passive voice—as actor-to-actee re¬ 
lations. 
To regard them thus generically is a great convenience; and 
thus to overlook specific character will work no harm, so long 
as the particular action is itself distinctly recognized. To il¬ 
lustrate this, an act of hiring plainly will not of itself alone 
develop any special form of actor-to-actee relation, save 
the one that I express by employer-to-employee—not the one, 
for instance, that I might express by murderer-to-victim. Ac¬ 
cordingly I do not risk confusion, if, instead of regarding 
“hired” as expressing an action-produced relation of employer- 
to-employee, I regard the word as expressing an employment- 
produced relation of actor-to-actee.* 
*In other publications I have given reasons for believing such to be 
the meaning of the verb, the nominative and accusative inflections 
of its subject and its object showing in the given illustration that 
relation indicated by the verb obtains between (first) Brown and (sec¬ 
ond) Johnson, thought of in that order only. 
