Passive voice expressed by means of the active voice

I wonder what the reason is to say These cakes sell well instead of These cakes are being sold well.

I understand that it’s shorter but it doesn’t work with any verb, does it? For example, The house is being built can’t be substituted by The house is building.

So, what justifies and makes it acceptable to compose such a sentence which we can see in the example with the verb sell? Does it have something to do with the verb used or something else? If so, are there many verbs which can be used that way?

Solution 1:

The question touches on several issues. Stated as it is, there's no single answer.
However, many of the issues touched on are fairly well understood.

First, terminology. Passive refers to a syntactic process only. It does not refer to meaning. Consequently one cannot "express the Passive voice by means of the active voice". Or by any means.

Passive is not "expressed". A Passive clause is determined by inspection. If a clause has
  1. a be auxiliary verb, followed by the past participle of the main verb, and
  2. a patient subject that could be the object of the active verb, and
  3. an optional by-phrase agent that could be the subject of the active verb,
  then it's Passive. Otherwise, it's not Passive. What it means or doesn't mean is irrelevant.

That's so you understand what I'm talking about, which is variation in Subject and Object.
Passive is just one of a number of ways English has to vary what nouns appear as Su and DO.
  (which I suspect is what is meant in the original question, or I wouldn't answer it this way)

Two ways in particular are mentioned in the question.

One way is what Colin Fine points out is called the Middle construction, or alternation.
It's the first topic taken up, on p.26, in Beth Levin's book English Verb Classes and Alternations.

It has a lot of quirks; as Levin puts it,

The middle construction is characterized by a lack of specific time reference and by an understood but unexpressed agent. More often than not, a middle construction includes an adverbial or modal element.

Some other Middle examples (asterisk * before a sentence indicates an ungrammatical sentence):

• This book reads easily = This book can be read easily = Unspec can read this book easily
• This book sells fast = This book sells itself = Unspec can sell (many copies of) this book easily
• This dress travels well = It is easy (for Unspec) to travel with this dress
  but
• *French fabrics adore easily ≠ It is easy (for Unspec) to adore French fabrics

Another way to vary Su and DO is to use a present participle, instead of a Passive:

• The bridge is still being built = The bridge is still building = Unspec is still building the bridge
  The second one of these is an areal variant, dating back to an earlier construction.
  In some areas of the Anglophone world, one might even say The bridge is still a-building.

This is similar to the areal usages of present and past participles with need:

• This car needs washing = This car needs washed = Unspec needs to wash this car

the second example above is, again, areal.