 Since grammar is mainly concerned with the principles of grammatical speech, one could expect these principles to be the active modes of signifying—the formal features of the words that constitute a grammatical phrase. However, since the active modes are notionally identical to the passive ones, Brito claims that, from a formal perspective, both the active and the passive modes of signifying are the principles of grammatical constructions. The modes of being, on the contrary, are the principles of grammatical constructions only insofar as they are consignified by the parts of speech (QPm; QPm-1980: 173).