La voz pasiva es una construcción o conjugación verbal en algunas lenguas por la cual se presenta al sujeto como pasivo (sujeto paciente), mientras que la acción ejecutada por el verbo es desempeñada por un complemento (complemento agente) y no por el sujeto agente del verbo en voz activa. La voz pasiva convierte a un verbo transitivo en un verbo intransitivo con un sólo argumento principal posible (el agente cuando se expresa mediante un adjunto marcado con caso oblicuo o preposicional). El griego, el latín, entre otras lenguas, poseen morfemas específicos para la voz pasiva; en castellano lo más parecido que hay es el morfema se de la llamada pasiva refleja (Se vende piso = Un piso es vendido por alguien). El inglés, el español y otras lenguas neolatinas o románicas utilizan construcciones perifrásticas para formar la voz pasiva: Verbo ser en el tiempo de la activa + participio del verbo que se conjuga. Por ejemplo, la conjugación pasiva correspondiente a He saludado a un amigo es Un amigo ha sido saludado (por mi).

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Passive voice is a grammatical voice common in many languages. In a clause with passive voice, the grammatical subject expresses the theme or patient of the main verb – that is, the person or thing that undergoes the action or has its state changed. This contrasts with active voice, in which the subject has the agent role. For example, in the passive sentence "The tree was pulled down", the subject (the tree) denotes the patient rather than the agent of the action. In contrast, the sentences "Someone pulled down the tree" and "The tree is down" are active sentences. Typically, in passive clauses, what is usually expressed by the object (or sometimes another argument) of the verb is now expressed by the subject, while what is usually expressed by the subject is either deleted, or is indicated by some adjunct of the clause. Thus, turning an active verb into a passive verb is a valence-decreasing process ("detransitivizing process"), because it turns transitive verbs into intransitive verbs. This is not always the case; for example in Japanese a passive-voice construction does not necessarily decrease valence. Many languages have both an active and a passive voice; this allows for greater flexibility in sentence construction, as either the semantic agent or patient may take the syntactic role of subject. The use of passive voice allows speakers to organize stretches of discourse by placing figures other than the agent in subject position. This may be done to foreground the patient, recipient, or other thematic role; it may also be useful when the semantic patient is the topic of on-going discussion. The passive voice may also be used to avoid specifying the agent of an action.

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