Owen—Relations Expressed by the Passive Voice. 91 
Possible means 
On page 8-9 I outlined one of these, which now I will 
examine somewhat more completely—thus: Suppose an ac¬ 
tion which develops a particular relation; and suppose I wish 
to indicate reverse relation. I may replace original action by 
another action which establishes relation more or less exactly the 
reverse of that established by the original action. For instance, 
given “The box overlies the book’ 5 expressing (figuratively) the 
action-established relation of upper-todower, the reverse rela¬ 
tion of lower-to-upper is established by the action named in 
“The book underlies the box.” The verb-form “underlies” ac¬ 
cordingly may be compelled to carry out essentially that pur¬ 
pose of the passive voice which is distinctly indicated in “The 
book is overlain by the box.” 
'Now the tendency of language usage is notorious: to take 
an ell when given an inch. If “under” in the present case 
successfully suggests reverse relation, why not use it for sug¬ 
gesting all reverse relations? What is sauce for the goose is 
sauce for the gander. As a virtual passive for “The boy has 
climbed the tree,” why not “The tree has underclimbed the boy ?” 
Why not moreover let the usual erosive influences have their 
way? These would in the course of time reduce the “under,” 
say to “u”—a prefix with the power always to suggest reverse 
relation. A verb attended by this prefix might be ranked es¬ 
sentially as the inflectional offspring of the active voice—as 
legitimately passive. 
Of such offspring it might be expected that linguistic ingen¬ 
uity would be prolific—capable of reaching more than one 
solution of the passive problem. Other prepositions (adverbs) 
—e. g. “counter,” “anti,” “re” and many more—effect required 
suggestion of reverseness quite as plainly and with larger range 
of applicability than “under”. Moreover, quite as truly as 
these prepositions, readjustments in the structure of the verbal 
form itself are eminently capable of intimating the required 
readjusted thinking. A shift of the syllabic accent from the 
verb’s beginning to its end, or vice versa—in other words the 
