How can passive voice change which part of an event receives attention in a sentence?

In the study of semantics and grammar, the passive voice functions as a tool to shift the focus of a sentence by changing the relationship between the participants and the event.1

While an active sentence typically highlights the "doer" (agent) as the subject, the passive voice promotes the "receiver" (goal) to the position of the grammatical subject. This syntactic shift allows the speaker to emphasize the result or the affected entity rather than the cause or the agent.21

The passive voice is particularly effective for shifting attention in the following ways:

• Prioritizing the Result: It emphasizes the condition of an object or the outcome of an event, making the identity of the agent secondary or irrelevant.2
• Impersonal Reporting: In scientific or formal contexts, it allows for an objective focus on the experiment or process itself, rather than the person performing the actions.21
• Handling Unknown Agents: It enables the communication of an event when the doer is unknown or intentionally omitted, such as in news reports where the occurrence is more significant than the perpetrator.23

By reordering these elements, the passive voice alters the thematic prominence of the sentence's components.1