Looked

AnonymousHi.Can I say that the sentence John looked angry is in the passive voice (hence the adjective), whereas the sentence John looked angrily is in the active voice?Thank you.

No. The word "angry" is, in the first sentence, a description of John's facial expression.
The word "angrily" in the second sentence is how he is gazing at something.

Thank you, AS, for your useful reply.

AnonymousCan I say that the sentence John looked angry is in the passive voice (hence the adjective), whereas the sentence John looked angrily is in the active voice?

No. The presence of an adjective has nothing to do with forming the passive voice. A transitive verb is needed:

The dog bit the man.

Here bit is in t

Thank you, AG, for your useful reply. Of course that you are right. But my argument is somehow going beyond the formal grammar description of passivity. In "John looked angry" "looked" is a linking verb and "angry" is a complement. That seems obvious. Yet, there is an element of passivity in the "John looked angry", i.e. it is us who see John as an angry man; in other words it was the perception o

AnonymousYet, there is an element of passivity in the "John looked angry", i.e. it is us who see John as an angry man; in other words it was the perception of the observers who looked at him.

Passive voice is a grammatical construction.
The object of the action is the grammatical subject of the sentence. In your sentence, John looked angrily, it is