[Sharlin]

The phrasal verb "blow up" can be either transitive or intransitive.

"The bus blew up" is a perfectly active clause. "The bus" is the subject, it did its own blowing-up.

"The bus was blown up" is a passive clause. "The bus" is the object, some unnamed entity acted on the bus.

[wrqvrwvq]

For completeness, the transitive active might be "The terrorist blew up the bus". In the intransitive case you can infer the reflexive case (agent acting upon itself), "The bus blew itself up". Some languages have a formal "middle voice" for reflexion.

English lacks a formal middle and there is a good deal of established literature on verbal aspects where the subject is not really the agent called "ergative".

There is utility in comparing "the bus exploded", perhaps unclear as to the agent, but language is not an agent game. It's trying to convey information, which is clear enough in these cases.

[tptacek]

I like "the bus blew up the terrorist" as a clearer illustration. :P

[direwolf20]

grammatically active, functionally passive, exactly as GP said

[yongjik]

The whole point of the article is that there's no such thing like "functionally passive" and people will invariably twist themselves into knots if they actually try to give it a, let's say, functional definition.

You could simply say "You must be clear who did what" and it would be as good an advice as any, but people have to shove in "passive" into the advice, which serves no purpose and just makes things more confusing.

[helicalspiral]

The author is a linguist where passive has a technical definition and implicitly wishes that people would use some other word for what they have an issue with.

[tptacek]

How is it even functionally passive?

[direwolf20]

It doesn't tell you who blew up the bus

[Sharlin]

A bus can blow up of its own accord if, for example, its fuel tank explodes. There's no need for an external agent.

[tptacek]

The volcano erupted.

Is that passive?

[direwolf20]

No, the volcano caused the eruption. Who caused the bus explosion? You are fixated on the grammatical parse tree instead of the reality conveyed by the grammar, what happened in the universe and what information is conveyed.

[tptacek]

Maybe this is just the programmer in me but it really feels like the difference between an abstract syntax tree and an IR is apposite here. You're evaluating at the wrong level. But also: who's to say the bus didn't decide to blow up all by itself? The bus can be the agent, the same way the volcano is.

If you think that couldn't happen, you never rode in my 2011 Audi A6 that blew up on the Ike, and that I parked in a CPD parking lot, flames jumping out from under the hood, and walked away from like a fucking Batman villain, clicking the key fob just to hear it go "beep-boop-beep" one last time.