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I'm rather confused regarding the following sentence:

Labels are confirmed.

are confirmed represent a passive-voice or 'confirmed' is just an adjective, describing the labels?

SunnySideDown
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1 Answers1

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It's passive voice if adding by X after confirmed would make sense.

A speaker/writer may not add the by X for a few reasons:

  • the speaker/writer has already said who/what X is and doesn't want to be overly repetitive

  • the speaker/writer doesn't know who X is at all.

Otherwise confirmed would just describe the state of the labels.

In your example there isn't enough context to know 100% for sure, but heuristically it's common to want to know whether or not something is confirmed, so it's most likely being used as an adjective.

LawrenceC
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    I'll give more context. Customer to supplier: "My manager has confirmed the labels, after looking into the matter." Referring to the passive-voice option as the answer, I guess that this active-voice should turn to a passive voice differently: The labels have been confirmed, but for a short Email, maybe it is too long, so the customer used shorter construction of the passive-voice, "The labels are confirmed". – SunnySideDown Apr 12 '19 at 09:43
  • In case "attached" and "confirmed" are indeed adjectives, what type of adjective are they? – SunnySideDown Apr 12 '19 at 16:29