Verbs that can be used as both passive and active in the same form - how to determine if a verb is a such one? [duplicate]

Some English verbs can be used in the same form in both active and passive meaning. E.g.:

• (active) I change the world - (passive) the world changes (i.e is being changed).
• (active) I open the door - (passive) the door opens (i.e is being opened by me).
• (active) I break a bone - (passive) a bone breaks.
• etc

Not to be confused with passive voice though. It's not actually passive ('the door closes' is not same as 'the door is closed') but you definitely can feel the difference of meaning - 'I close the door' and 'the door closes' - it's like the opposite directions of actor and subject: in first form subject is actor, in the second the subject is the object being acting on.

In Russian, we have a special category for this - the reflexiveness. A reflexive verb is formed by adding a -ся postfix which literally means 'itself'. That is, if one closes (закрывает) the door, then the door closes (закрывается) - that is literally 'closes itself' which is nonsense but it means that the door doesn't close anything, but it is being closed itself.

I remember there is a general rule in English how to determine if a verb can be used in such way or not. It has something to do with transitiveness (intransitive cannot). But apparently, this rule has many exceptions, it's more kinda guess than a strict rule. I found it somewhere in the Internet long time ago but cannot find it now anymore.

Could you please explain more about this topic? How such verbs are called in English linguistics? What is the rule? What does transitiveness have to do with all this? etc

Solution 1:

The thing is that some verbs, like "close", don't always have the same transitivity and the meaning changes depending on that. When you say "I closed the door" close is a transitive verb that means the action you take on the door of closing it. However, when you say "the door closed" that is an intransitive verb, and it's meaning is different, in this case it simply means the 'change in state' of becoming closed, not an action. That is why the 'feel' of the sentence is different from saying "the door was closed", which uses the passive voice and the transitive "close" and directly implies an action taken by someone (or something) even if not stated. I am afraid this (like many things in English) doesn't exactly have a rule, my intuition is that verbs that imply a 'change in state' usually work like that ("I boiled the water" vs "the water boiled"; "I froze the pizza" vs "the pizza froze") but my advice would be looking at a dictionary for the different definitions given to the transitive and intransitive forms.

Solution 2:

You're confusing "active" and "passive" with a different phenomenon.
Passive is a rule of English, and sentences like these are not examples of Passive:

• The world changes.
• The door opens.
• A bone breaks.

Passive requires an auxiliary verb and a past participle.
These sentences have no auxiliary verb and no past participle.

So this is not about Passive; rather, this is an example of the difference between
Inchoative and Causative verbs. Inchoative verbs refer to the change of a state or the beginning/continuation/ending of an action. They are intransitive, but they are not Passive. Causative verbs, on the other hand, are transitive, with causer as the subject and the result as the object. This is not Passive, either.

• They changed the record. ~ The record changed.
• They opened the door. ~ The door opened.
• He breaks a bone. ~ A bone breaks.

In fact, the word "active" is usually reserved in English grammar for verbs that act syntactically active -- they take the progressive, they can be used in the imperative or with Action do, etc:

• He is renting that house in Ypsilanti. (rent is an active verb)
• *He is owning that house in Ypsilanti. (own is a stative verb)