Defining Passive Voice (help!)
Peter B. Steiger
and major in our childrens' education. She is the teacher (with a
few exceptions, like Beach Boys Appreciation 101 and Computer
Programming For Total Geeks), but as principal I like to think I have
some authority in this house. Hey, a guy can dream, can't he?
Anyway, today's debate came up when she tried to explain to
9.35-year-old why passive voice is a Bad Thing in writing. She
started citing examples of his crime from the notes he took on
a book he is reading, and I noticed that many of her examples
were simple descriptive statements: "Marco Polo was tired
after his voyage", "The capital city was magnificent", etc.
I jumped in at this point with my usual authoritative voice,
stating that the dreaded passive construct only applies when
the subject is the recipient of an action, and she laughed at
me in the way that only Mensans can laugh at their non-Mensan
husbands who utter nonsensical statements like "But honey,
how can you afford that new sewing machine if we don't have
any money in the bank?"
I say, the construct (subject-linking verb-predicate) is NOT
passive; it does not receive any action. "To be" may not
be a real high-octane action like "To explode" or "To annihilate",
but dang it, it's a perfectly honest verb that never did anything
to hurt anybody.
She says that any sentence which contains any form of "to be"
is Evil Incarnate and represents passive voice in its vilest form.
I realize that by posting this question in the mother of all
grammatical flamewars I'm inviting disaster, but what I'd really
like is a pointer to some authoritative reference I can rub her
nose in. I mean, in which I can rub her nose. Actually I'd
be delighted (albeit disappointed) if the reference proves
me wrong; I just want some kind of official answer so we
can go back to arguing about why the sea is boiling hot
and whether pigs have wings.
OK, your responses are eagerly awaited {chortle}.
Peter B. Steiger
Cheyenne, WY
----
If you reply by email, send it to pbs at com dot
canada (or vice-versa). All advertisements will be
returned to your postmaster, eh!
Richard Fontana
> As homeschoolers, my wife and I often disagree over points minor
> and major in our childrens' education. She is the teacher (with a
> few exceptions, like Beach Boys Appreciation 101 and Computer
> Programming For Total Geeks), but as principal I like to think I have
> some authority in this house. Hey, a guy can dream, can't he?
>
> Anyway, today's debate came up when she tried to explain to
> 9.35-year-old why passive voice is a Bad Thing in writing. She
> started citing examples of his crime from the notes he took on
> a book he is reading, and I noticed that many of her examples
> were simple descriptive statements: "Marco Polo was tired
> after his voyage", "The capital city was magnificent", etc.
That's not the passive voice. Those are sentences with "to be" in the
past tense.
> I jumped in at this point with my usual authoritative voice,
> stating that the dreaded passive construct only applies when
> the subject is the recipient of an action, and she laughed at
> me in the way that only Mensans can laugh at their non-Mensan
> husbands who utter nonsensical statements like "But honey,
> how can you afford that new sewing machine if we don't have
> any money in the bank?"
>
> I say, the construct (subject-linking verb-predicate) is NOT
> passive; it does not receive any action. "To be" may not
> be a real high-octane action like "To explode" or "To annihilate",
> but dang it, it's a perfectly honest verb that never did anything
> to hurt anybody.
>
> She says that any sentence which contains any form of "to be"
> is Evil Incarnate and represents passive voice in its vilest form.
>
> I realize that by posting this question in the mother of all
> grammatical flamewars I'm inviting disaster, but what I'd really
> like is a pointer to some authoritative reference I can rub her
> nose in. I mean, in which I can rub her nose. Actually I'd
> be delighted (albeit disappointed) if the reference proves
> me wrong; I just want some kind of official answer so we
> can go back to arguing about why the sea is boiling hot
> and whether pigs have wings.
>
> OK, your responses are eagerly awaited {chortle}.
This should be intelligently explained in any reasonable
junior-high-school-level textbook on English grammar. I'm all for home
schooling, but I am concerned that in this particular area your child is
getting a deficient education. Either understand what you're talking
about or don't teach it at all.
Skitt
"Richard Fontana" <rf...@sparky.cs.nyu.edu> wrote in message
news:Pine.GSO.4.21.010621...@sparky.cs.nyu.edu...
> On Fri, 22 Jun 2001, Peter B. Steiger wrote:
>
> > As homeschoolers, my wife and I often disagree over points minor
> > and major in our childrens' education.
[snip]
> I'm all for home schooling, but I am concerned that in this particular
area
> your child is getting a deficient education. Either understand what
you're
> talking about or don't teach it at all.
Here we see the dangers of home schooling. On the other side of the coin,
though, are "real" schools doing their job competently? No. Which is the
lesser of the two evils? Somehow I think that many teachers, each with a
specialty in their field, are better than one "smarter than the average
bear" instructor.
As for the main question (snipped), I agree with your views completely.
Also -- Peter, the plural possessive of "child" is "children's".
--
Skitt (in SF Bay Area) http://i.am/skitt/
I speak English well -- I learn it from a book!
-- Manuel of "Fawlty Towers" (he's from Barcelona).
David Platt
--On Thursday, June 21, 2001 5:48 PM -0700 Skitt <sk...@earthlink.net>
wrote:
> Here we see the dangers of home schooling. On the other side of the coin,
> though, are "real" schools doing their job competently? No. Which is the
> lesser of the two evils? Somehow I think that many teachers, each with a
> specialty in their field, are better than one "smarter than the average
> bear" instructor.
Apparently some 'real schools' are not doing their job very well either.
Here's a guideline snipped from Carnegie Mellon University's "Writer's
Style Guide." Members of CMU's English department put together this guide.
I am more than a little embarassed to be associated with said department
right now. ;-)
http://www.cmu.edu/styleguide/trickywords.html
>Sometimes passive voice is a better choice. For example, when the
recipient of an award is >more important than the awarding body, it's
better to keep this information in the lead of the >sentence: "Blair
Underwood (1988) was the 2000 commencement speaker."
Michael J Hardy
> Anyway, today's debate came up when she tried to explain to
> 9.35-year-old why passive voice is a Bad Thing in writing. She
> started citing examples of his crime from the notes he took on
> a book he is reading, and I noticed that many of her examples
> were simple descriptive statements: "Marco Polo was tired
> after his voyage", "The capital city was magnificent", etc.
"The capital city was magnificent" is NOT an instance of the
passive voice at all! The passive voice results from a _transformation_
of a sentence that was in the active voice, thus:
Active: A groks B.
Passive: B is grokked (by A).
Active: I see the cat.
Passive: The cat is seen (by me).
"The city is lovely" is NOT the result of any such transformation!
For the one about Marco Polo, one could imagine a transformation:
Active: These exertions tired Marco Polo.
Passive: Marco Polo was tired (by these exertions).
But usually, "tired" is thought of a just an adjective rather than
a participle of the verb "to tire". The transformation from active
to passive always results in a verb's being transformed into a
participle.
If your wife thinks "The city was magnificent" is an example
of the passive voice, she's TOTALLY missed the point of what the
passive voice is, unless she explains who "magnificenned" the city.
I have no idea how to "magnificen" a city.
Mike Hardy
David Platt
--On Thursday, June 21, 2001 9:08 PM -0400 David Platt
<dpl...@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
> I am more than a little embarassed to be associated with said
> department right now. ;-)
...and even more embarrassed that I forgot to proofread my post before
sending.
Richard Fontana
> Apparently some 'real schools' are not doing their job very well either.
> Here's a guideline snipped from Carnegie Mellon University's "Writer's
> Style Guide." Members of CMU's English department put together this guide.
> I am more than a little embarassed to be associated with said department
> right now. ;-)
>
> http://www.cmu.edu/styleguide/trickywords.html
>
> >Sometimes passive voice is a better choice. For example, when the
> recipient of an award is >more important than the awarding body, it's
> better to keep this information in the lead of the >sentence: "Blair
> Underwood (1988) was the 2000 commencement speaker."
If you're associated with said department, can't you bring this to their
attention so that it gets removed or corrected?
Peter B. Steiger
>Here's a guideline snipped from Carnegie Mellon University's "Writer's
>Style Guide." Members of CMU's English department put together this
> guide.
I feel your pain. When I went out hunting for information, I found
this delightfully unintentional counterexample:
http://www.revisor.leg.state.mn.us/arule/Section3.htm
> Never Use the Passive When You Can Use the Active
> This advice is quoted from George Orwell's Politics and the
> English Language, an essay that first appeared in 1945. The
> advice has been repeated for 52 years, but it never seems to
> take hold. Maybe it needs to be better explained.
"This advice is quoted..."
"The advice has been repeated..."
"... it needs to be better explained."
David Platt
--On Thursday, June 21, 2001 9:58 PM -0400 Richard Fontana
<rf...@sparky.cs.nyu.edu> wrote:
> If you're associated with said department, can't you bring this to their
> attention so that it gets removed or corrected?
I've mentioned the mistake to several people in the department who have the
authority to change it, but nobody has done anything about it yet. Given
that I'm just a lowly undergrad, they're probably not even listening. I
would think that they would jump at the chance to correct it.
R H Draney
news:Pine.GSO.4.21.010621...@sparky.cs.nyu.edu...
>
> > Anyway, today's debate came up when she tried to explain to
> > 9.35-year-old why passive voice is a Bad Thing in writing. She
> > started citing examples of his crime from the notes he took on
> > a book he is reading, and I noticed that many of her examples
> > were simple descriptive statements: "Marco Polo was tired
> > after his voyage", "The capital city was magnificent", etc.
>
> That's not the passive voice. Those are sentences with "to be" in the
> past tense.
You're half right...the second sentence is as you say...the first is passive
for something like "The long voyage tired Marco Polo."
> > I say, the construct (subject-linking verb-predicate) is NOT
> > passive; it does not receive any action. "To be" may not
> > be a real high-octane action like "To explode" or "To annihilate",
> > but dang it, it's a perfectly honest verb that never did anything
> > to hurt anybody.
> >
> > She says that any sentence which contains any form of "to be"
> > is Evil Incarnate and represents passive voice in its vilest form.
Not the same thing as what you're claiming...show me how "The ball is blue"
is passive...you need a verb's participle form as the object of the "to be"
verb for it to qualify as passive....
There are times when using the passive is laudable, but *in general* it
should be avoided (self-reference intentional)...excessive use of the
passive leads to "not-my-job" sentences, which is why it's so popular in the
business community ("The employee was reprimanded" hides from view whoever
it was that had to do the dirty deed)....
I used to edit technical documentation...ín the interests of clarity (and
accountability), I preferred to cast as many sentences as possible in active
voice...when I couldn't *find* the agent to go with an action, I substituted
"elves" (since naming none seemed to suggest that the action somehow
occurred magically), thus:
"The report is checked and any errors are corrected before it is
resubmitted."
becomes
"Elves check the report and correct any errors before they resubmit the
report."
Handing such verbiage in for review was usually enough to ensure that the
agent responsible was made known (yes, I know) before the next draft came
out....
I like to greet those persons who insist upon *speaking* entirely in the
passive voice as follows:
"Being met is nice. That well is being felt is hoped."
But then, I don't recommend this for everyone; I *am* a licensed
smartass....r
Mike Oliver
>
> "Richard Fontana" <rf...@sparky.cs.nyu.edu> wrote in message
> news:Pine.GSO.4.21.010621...@sparky.cs.nyu.edu...
>> On Fri, 22 Jun 2001, Peter B. Steiger wrote:
>>
>>> Anyway, today's debate came up when she tried to explain to
>>> 9.35-year-old why passive voice is a Bad Thing in writing. She
>>> started citing examples of his crime from the notes he took on
>>> a book he is reading, and I noticed that many of her examples
>>> were simple descriptive statements: "Marco Polo was tired
>>> after his voyage", "The capital city was magnificent", etc.
>>
>> That's not the passive voice. Those are sentences with "to be" in the
>> past tense.
>
> You're half right...the second sentence is as you say...the first is passive
> for something like "The long voyage tired Marco Polo."
If you interpret "Marco Polo was tired after his voyage" as a passive-voice
usage of the transitive verb "to tire", then surely the tiring of Polo
must have occured *after* the voyage.
Marco Polo was tired after his long voyage by a cunning team
of torturers who would not permit him to sleep until he revealed
the military secrets of the Most Serene Republic of Venice
or something like that.
Peter B. Steiger
>This should be intelligently explained in any reasonable
>junior-high-school-level textbook on English grammar.
in any of our textbooks, I wouldn't have donned the
asbestos undergarments for a trip to a.u.e. For example,
here's one: "Designating a voice of a verb that indicates
the subject is receiving the action." She claims this definition
does not exclude the linking verb; I disagree (along with you
and everyone else here, apparently).
> I'm all for home
>schooling, but I am concerned that in this particular area your child is
>getting a deficient education. Either understand what you're talking
>about or don't teach it at all.
You're kidding, right? Both our kids could parse the individual
parts of speech from a sentence long before their peers could
finish the alphabet. While I don't put much stock in standardized
tests beyond their use as a rough guideline to tell us what areas
need more work, Number One Daughter has ranked in the 99th
percentile across the board on all sections of the Stanford
Achievement Test since the 5th grade, and Number One Son
keeps a few car lengths ahead of his peers with scores between
the 60th and 99th percentiles. He's the main reason we started
homeschooling to begin with. Heck, Irene could excel academically
if she ran off to the jungle to be raised by a pack of orangutans;
she doesn't need us OR public school. On the other foot, if we
hadn't taken Daniel's education as a lifetime commitment he
would be doped up on Ritalin and held back in the 1st grade
with the other kids who can't learn the alphabet because they
can't stop bashing their heads into the wall.
Do you honestly think we're incompetent morons because
we can't agree whether a particular construct is classified as
passive voice? Oh, I'll readily agree we aren't perfect, but
I've got a news flash for you - neither are football coaches
who spend their off period teaching history classes, or
self-aggrandized "educators" who have 27 degrees in the
latest pop psychology but can't keep Junior from taking
out his frustrations with his dad's army rifle.
For heaven's sake, why do you think I bothered to come
out here (and surf the web, and scour every book I could
find in the house) looking for an answer? It's IMPORTANT
to me to ensure that we don't mislead the young minds that
are in our care; it is important enough that I'll take the time to
gather information from a wide variety of sources rather than
just take one person's (or book's) word for it. I laugh at
your concern! Ptui! Ptui!
Sorry, I got carried away there.
"Backwards words say to used I. S*** oh! Again go I there!"
- George Carlin
Peter B. Steiger
> Marco Polo was tired after his long voyage by a cunning team
> of torturers who would not permit him to sleep until he revealed
> the military secrets of the Most Serene Republic of Venice
>
>or something like that.
Or perhaps, "Elves tired Marco Polo." Hee hee! I see now
that I should have chosen less controversial examples.
Franke
R H Draney wrote:
> "Richard Fontana" <rf...@sparky.cs.nyu.edu> wrote in message
> news:Pine.GSO.4.21.010621...@sparky.cs.nyu.edu...
> > On Fri, 22 Jun 2001, Peter B. Steiger wrote:
> >
> > > Anyway, today's debate came up when she tried to explain to
> > > 9.35-year-old why passive voice is a Bad Thing in writing. She
> > > started citing examples of his crime from the notes he took on
> > > a book he is reading, and I noticed that many of her examples
> > > were simple descriptive statements: "Marco Polo was tired
> > > after his voyage", "The capital city was magnificent", etc.
> >
> > That's not the passive voice. Those are sentences with "to be" in the
> > past tense.
>
> You're half right...the second sentence is as you say...the first is passive
> for something like "The long voyage tired Marco Polo."
How is "Marco Polo was tired after his voyage" any different from
"Marco Polo was 5 years older after his voyage"? Unless, of course,
you mean that the voyage put tires (tyres) on him. The sentence
"Marco Polo was tired by his voyage" is the passive of "The long
voyage tired Marco Polo", surely. The preposition "after" removes
the offending sentence from the realm of the passive, it seems to me.
[snipt]
Franke
"Peter B. Steiger" wrote:
> [snipt]
> For heaven's sake, why do you think I bothered to come
> out here (and surf the web, and scour every book I could
> find in the house) looking for an answer? It's IMPORTANT
> to me to ensure that we don't mislead the young minds that
> are in our care; it is important enough that I'll take the time to
> gather information from a wide variety of sources rather than
> just take one person's (or book's) word for it.
I admire your commitment and am thinking that I will probably
have to do the same thing for my son here in Taiwan--I refuse
to send him to one of those American schools-- when he gets
out of elementary school. But what are you going to do when
you get to the hard stuff? It's not easy to decide what to put
into your science and math curriculum if you're not strong in
those areas, or what books to use to teach US and world
history, or how to teach English and American literature
if you haven't got the background to make good choices
of what works to teach and how to talk about them beyond
the basic level of facts and your own opinions. And how
about foreign languages?
What else do they teach in American high schools these days
besides how not to offend anyone?
R J Valentine
} On Thu, 21 Jun 2001 21:08:47 -0400, David Platt sez:
}>Here's a guideline snipped from Carnegie Mellon University's "Writer's
}>Style Guide." Members of CMU's English department put together this
}> guide.
}
} I feel your pain. When I went out hunting for information, I found
} this delightfully unintentional counterexample:
} http://www.revisor.leg.state.mn.us/arule/Section3.htm
}
}> Never Use the Passive When You Can Use the Active
}> This advice is quoted from George Orwell's Politics and the
}> English Language, an essay that first appeared in 1945. The
}> advice has been repeated for 52 years, but it never seems to
}> take hold. Maybe it needs to be better explained.
} "This advice is quoted..."
} "The advice has been repeated..."
} "... it needs to be better explained."
"[U]nintentional", you say? I wouldn't even begin to suspect
unintentional. Where did you get unintentional out of it?
--
R. J. Valentine <mailto:r...@smart.net>
Charles Riggs
>This should be intelligently explained in any reasonable
>junior-high-school-level textbook on English grammar. I'm all for home
>schooling, but I am concerned that in this particular area your child is
>getting a deficient education. Either understand what you're talking
>about or don't teach it at all.
Yeah, yeah. Instead of this though, can you define passive voice for
us? It's been a long time since junior high and the definition is not
completely clear to me.
Charles Riggs
Charles Riggs
Steiger) wrote:
>For heaven's sake, why do you think I bothered to come
>out here (and surf the web, and scour every book I could
>find in the house) looking for an answer? It's IMPORTANT
>to me to ensure that we don't mislead the young minds that
>are in our care; it is important enough that I'll take the time to
>gather information from a wide variety of sources rather than
>just take one person's (or book's) word for it. I laugh at
>your concern! Ptui! Ptui!
>
>Sorry, I got carried away there.
That's OK, Peter; I think you caught Richard in a snippy mood --
generally speaking, he's a nice enough fellow. Anyway, welcome to
alt.usage.english and keep on posting.
Charles Riggs
Peter B. Steiger
>"[U]nintentional", you say? I wouldn't even begin to suspect
>unintentional. Where did you get unintentional out of it?
Hmmmmm... you have me there. Irony is such a lost art in
our culture, I just *assume* any occurrence is unintentional.
Yeah, I know where assuming gets you...
Franke
"Peter B. Steiger" wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Jun 2001 20:16:51 -0400, Richard Fontana sez:
> >This should be intelligently explained in any reasonable
> >junior-high-school-level textbook on English grammar.
> {shrug} If we had been able to agree on the explanation
> in any of our textbooks, I wouldn't have donned the
> asbestos undergarments for a trip to a.u.e. For example,
> here's one: "Designating a voice of a verb that indicates
> the subject is receiving the action." She claims this definition
> does not exclude the linking verb; I disagree (along with you
> and everyone else here, apparently).
All passive voice constructions include the "copula" (or "be"
verb) + participle. The two sentences you gave as examples,
"Marco Polo was tired after his voyage", "The capital city was
magnificent", contain no action. If your wife cannot see this,
how can she teach your children why the passive is generally--
but not always--best avoided? While it is true that teaching is
often the best way to learn something, it is also true that trying
to keep one step ahead of your students is a dangerous way
to teach, especially when you don't know what the issues of
significance are. A teacher should have a much bigger picture
of what she's teaching than all the chapters she's already taught
and the next one.
I agree with Prof Fontana's admonition. If you don't understand
what you're teaching, then you should not teach it. If you cannot
answer the question Why?--as in Why is this a passive if there
is no particple and no action, or Why should I avoid the passive
whenever possible?, or When should I use the passive?, or If
the passive is no good, why does it exist?--then you do not
understand enough to teach anyone about it, i.e., you cannot
(as in "are unable to") teach it. What could be simpler to
understand than that?
But neither you nor your wife is clear on the definition of
"linking verb". There is not only "be" but also appear, feel, look,
seem, smell, sound, taste, become, remain, end up,
get (= become), grow, etc. None of these linking verbs can
take the passive: They are all intransitive and so have no direct
objects that can be turned into agents acting on their subjects.
E.g.,
This bread tastes good.
Is an example of a sentence with a linking verb that cannot be
transformed into the passive voice without the addition of
another subject and verb, e.g.,
This bread is thought to taste good by John. [Awful!]
> > I'm all for home
> >schooling, but I am concerned that in this particular area your child is
> >getting a deficient education. Either understand what you're talking
> >about or don't teach it at all.
> You're kidding, right? Both our kids could parse the individual
> parts of speech from a sentence long before their peers could
> finish the alphabet.
This is not any test of language ability, merely of grammatical
knowledge. It does, however, help considerably when trying to
understand or teach why the language is used one way but not
another. Maybe you should ask your daughter to teach your son
about the passive.
> While I don't put much stock in standardized
> tests beyond their use as a rough guideline to tell us what areas
> need more work, Number One Daughter has ranked in the 99th
> percentile across the board on all sections of the Stanford
> Achievement Test since the 5th grade, and Number One Son
> keeps a few car lengths ahead of his peers with scores between
> the 60th and 99th percentiles. He's the main reason we started
> homeschooling to begin with. Heck, Irene could excel academically
> if she ran off to the jungle to be raised by a pack of orangutans;
> she doesn't need us OR public school. On the other foot, if we
> hadn't taken Daniel's education as a lifetime commitment he
> would be doped up on Ritalin and held back in the 1st grade
> with the other kids who can't learn the alphabet because they
> can't stop bashing their heads into the wall.
>
> Do you honestly think we're incompetent morons because
> we can't agree whether a particular construct is classified as
> passive voice? Oh, I'll readily agree we aren't perfect, but
> I've got a news flash for you - neither are football coaches
> who spend their off period teaching history classes, or
> self-aggrandized "educators"who have 27 degrees in the
> latest pop psychology but can't keep Junior from taking
> out his frustrations with his dad's army rifle.
That responsibility belongs to his dad and mom, doesn't it?
As much as I dislike the Public Education Establishment in
the USA, it seems clear that the American people as a
whole are responsible for what they think their public school
teachers have become over the last 30 years. The people
have politicized education to the point it is impossible to
teach anything without offending someone's ideology.
My friends who have taught in public schools in middle-
class American communities see the bureaucratic
restrictions on what teachers can do and say in the
classroom as impenetrable barriers to education, and
the ridiculous restraints on what may and may not be
read and discussed by students as a cop-out by both
the establishment and the parents of public school
students. So I commend you for taking your children's
education so seriously.
What qualifies a parent to be a homeschooler in
Wyoming, by the way?
> For heaven's sake, why do you think I bothered to come
> out here (and surf the web, and scour every book I could
> find in the house) looking for an answer?
Surely you have the Harbrace Handbook for Writers or some
such tome handy at home. These school handbooks all have
simple andd straightforward definitions and examples of the
passive and how to make it.
> It's IMPORTANT
> to me to ensure that we don't mislead the young minds that
> are in our care;
Then it is probably best to let others mislead them. You aren't
on a quest for "truth", I hope.
R H Draney
news:3B32CBF6...@seed.net.tw...
>
> R H Draney wrote:
>
> > You're half right...the second sentence is as you say...the first is
passive
> > for something like "The long voyage tired Marco Polo."
>
> How is "Marco Polo was tired after his voyage" any different from
> "Marco Polo was 5 years older after his voyage"? Unless, of course,
> you mean that the voyage put tires (tyres) on him. The sentence
> "Marco Polo was tired by his voyage" is the passive of "The long
> voyage tired Marco Polo", surely. The preposition "after" removes
> the offending sentence from the realm of the passive, it seems to me.
"Marco Polo was bloated after eating sixteen crates of Cathayan plums"....
Sounds to me like the plums had *something* to do with it....r
Franke
R H Draney wrote:
Yes, but one could say the same about the following:
"Marco Polo was {sick / ill} after eating sixteen crates of Cathayan plums"
"Marco Polo was fatter after eating sixteen crates of Cathayan plums"
"MP was blue in the face after eating sixteen crates of Cathayan plums"
"Marco Polo was messy after eating sixteen crates of Cathayan plums"
Quirk et al have a lot to say about passives. Here's one that is on point:
3.74 The passive gradient
The purely formal definition of the passive, viz that the clause
contains the construction be (or get) + -ed particple, is very
broad, and would include, for example, all of the following sentences:
[1] This violin was made by my father.
[2] This conclusion is hardly justified by the results.
[3] Coal has been replaced by oil.
[4] This difficulty can be avoided in several ways.
------------------------------------------------------------------
[5] We are encouraged to go on with the project.
[6] Leonard was interested in linguistics.
[7] The building is already demolished.
[8] The modern world is getting ('becoming')
more highly industrialized and mechanized.
But taking account of the verb's function and meaning,
we prefer to consider only those above the broken line
as passive. Those below the line, [5-8], do not have a
clear correspondence with an active phrase or active
clause, and are increasingly remote from the 'ideal'
passive of [1], which can be placed in direct
correspondence with a unqiue active counterpart.
The variety of relationships displayed by [1-8] may
well be reagraded as points on a gradient or scale
running from [1] to a sentence such as [9], which
is clearly to be analysed as having an adjectival
complement following a copular verb:
{was }
[9] My uncle {got } (very) tired.
{seemed }
The possibility of inserting very confirms the
adjectival status of tired.
Donna Richoux
I think there maybe be two different arguments going on between Peter
and his wife. Peter is remembering the specific grammatical definition
of "passive." His wife may be remembering general advice on good
writing. So Peter would be right on the technical name, and his wife on
the overall advice.
I agree with Michael's examples. "To be" is a verb that has no passive
form, because it would have to be "To be been by" which is impossible.
But then, nobody here thinks that they are face with anything like "to
be been by." That's not truly the question.
There are times when the passive form definitely is the best. However,
the overuse of passive verbs makes writing vague, boring, diffuse,
wordy, and otherwise Not Good.
I imagine Peter's wife is remembering general advice on making writing
strong and direct by avoiding the passive (whenever possible) and also
related forms that are not technically called "the passive" but are very
much like it and lead to the same bad qualities. One examplee would be
overuse of weak linking verbs instead of stronger, action-packed verbs.
Sentences that start off with "There were..." are weak, for example.
It's hard to think of how to describe this advice without using the
words "active" and "passive."
The on-line Strunk (no White) discusses this at
http://www.bartleby.com/141/strunk5.html
Search for the section headed:
11.Use the active voice.
--
Best wishes ---- Donna Richoux
Richard Fontana
Actually, no, I can't readily define passive voice, but I can recognize it
(I know it when I see it, as Potter Stewart said). I leave definitions to
experts like John Lawler (who, for all I know, might consider conventional
or traditional understandings of the active and passive voices to be
bogus). This has something to do with the way my mind works. I have
trouble with definitions; I find that definitions are usually
poorly worded or drafted. I need to see examples so that I can formulate
my own (possibly sub-verbal) definitions.
Here's an algorithm, though it isn't a definition. You can convert an
active voice sentence to a passive voice sentence by (1) making the direct
object of the active voice sentence the subject; (2) making the subject of
the active voice sentence, if you want to keep it, the object of the
preposition "by"; and (3) replacing the verb in the original sentence with
the form of "to be" in the tense used in the original sentence plus the
past participle.
Example:
Charles ogled the wench. => The wench was ogled by Charles.
It's pretty simple. Coming up with a definition is more difficult, and
seems to be something that should be left to the professional linguists
(like John Lawler), from which it can trickle down to us mortals (and to
writers of high-school English grammar textbooks).
Richard Fontana
> On Thu, 21 Jun 2001 20:16:51 -0400, Richard Fontana sez:
> >This should be intelligently explained in any reasonable
> >junior-high-school-level textbook on English grammar.
> {shrug} If we had been able to agree on the explanation
> in any of our textbooks, I wouldn't have donned the
> asbestos undergarments for a trip to a.u.e. For example,
> here's one: "Designating a voice of a verb that indicates
> the subject is receiving the action." She claims this definition
> does not exclude the linking verb; I disagree (along with you
> and everyone else here, apparently).
Aren't there any *examples*? It's like you're (or your wife is) reading
this stuff without any comprehension. As I stated in a reply to Charles
Riggs, I have never liked definitions, and I always need examples to
understand what the writer is trying to say. That's what's nice about
textbooks. It should be clear in any text discussing the passive that
you'll have examples like
The vase was carried
called "passive" but you won't have sentences like
The vase was green
called "passive". Don't you see an obvious difference between these two
sentences? That's how I learn things: I gather examples and find
patterns and differences. In a sense I have to write my own
definitions. I guess you could argue that my approach is more practical
and less intellectual, but who has a better intuitive understanding of
what the passive denotes? Even now I can't really give you an intelligent
definition of the passive without cheating. It doesn't matter.
See, there's a larger point which I didn't even touch on. I am not
bothered by the fact that you and your wife don't understand what "the
passive" means, since you both, and your children, use it every day, being
natural English speakers. I am bothered by the fact that your wife (with
your approval), without understanding what "the passive" means, feels free
to ignore her own lack of comprehension and teach her child that "it's
wrong to use the passive". This prohibition on using the passive is
itself completely bogus, though it seems to be rooted in a sincere effort
to get students to not use the passive *too much*, and (particularly in
writing certain kinds of material) to be clear about *who* is responsible
for particular actions. I shudder to think of how you teach math or
science. And how do you teach foreign languages? It's possible that I
first became aware of the meaning of the passive voice when studying a
foreign language. I think that actually understanding what the passive
voice is, in the context of English for a native English speaker, isn't
too important (unless it turns out that you're using it too much, in which
case it can become a matter of bad style).
> > I'm all for home
> >schooling, but I am concerned that in this particular area your child is
> >getting a deficient education. Either understand what you're talking
> >about or don't teach it at all.
> You're kidding, right?
No. Do realize how ridiculous it is to teach someone not to use the
passive when you yourself don't understand what it means?
> Both our kids could parse the individual
> parts of speech from a sentence long before their peers could
> finish the alphabet.
Okay, so they might be able to teach *you* about the passive.
> While I don't put much stock in standardized
> tests beyond their use as a rough guideline to tell us what areas
> need more work, Number One Daughter has ranked in the 99th
> percentile across the board on all sections of the Stanford
> Achievement Test since the 5th grade, and Number One Son
> keeps a few car lengths ahead of his peers with scores between
> the 60th and 99th percentiles. He's the main reason we started
> homeschooling to begin with. Heck, Irene could excel academically
> if she ran off to the jungle to be raised by a pack of orangutans;
> she doesn't need us OR public school. On the other foot, if we
> hadn't taken Daniel's education as a lifetime commitment he
> would be doped up on Ritalin and held back in the 1st grade
> with the other kids who can't learn the alphabet because they
> can't stop bashing their heads into the wall.
I hear ya.
> Do you honestly think we're incompetent morons because
> we can't agree whether a particular construct is classified as
> passive voice?
No! But to even *think* of teaching your son that something is wrong
without understanding it yourselves does raise all sorts of
questions. I'm not contending that learning this stuff is important -- I
actually don't think it is (the best way to learn to write well is to read
and to practice writing). It's the principle of the thing.
> Oh, I'll readily agree we aren't perfect, but
> I've got a news flash for you - neither are football coaches
> who spend their off period teaching history classes, or
> self-aggrandized "educators" who have 27 degrees in the
> latest pop psychology but can't keep Junior from taking
> out his frustrations with his dad's army rifle.
I don't disagree with these sentiments. Of course the dad's army rifle
phenomenon seems to be more prevalent in certain regions of the country.
> For heaven's sake, why do you think I bothered to come
> out here (and surf the web, and scour every book I could
> find in the house) looking for an answer?
If you have to turn to the web, and Usenet, to find an answer to this then
something is seriously wrong. I mean, just take this newsgroup: it's full
of crackpots who go on and on about the cot/caught merger and things like
that. Incidentally, I see that you're in Wyoming: do you pronounce cot
and caught alike?
> It's IMPORTANT
> to me to ensure that we don't mislead the young minds that
> are in our care; it is important enough that I'll take the time to
> gather information from a wide variety of sources rather than
> just take one person's (or book's) word for it. I laugh at
> your concern! Ptui! Ptui!
>
> Sorry, I got carried away there.
Why don't you take over the teaching of composition and grammar, and let
your wife handle other things, if she's better at those?
Passive:
John Lawler was attacked by gremlins.
Charles Riggs is made Man of the Year.
The war was won by the Reds.
The medal had been pinned on Arjay's chest but it was ripped off by Cob.
Non-passive:
John Lawler was a mortal man.
Charles Riggs is an Irish citizen.
The war was awful.
The medal on Arjay's chest was bright and shiny, and Cob was envious.
K1912
[...]
>> Yeah, yeah. Instead of this though, can you define passive voice for
>> us? It's been a long time since junior high and the definition is not
>> completely clear to me.
>
>Actually, no, I can't readily define passive voice, but I can recognize it
>(I know it when I see it, as Potter Stewart said). I leave definitions to
>experts like John Lawler (who, for all I know, might consider conventional
>or traditional understandings of the active and passive voices to be
>bogus). This has something to do with the way my mind works. I have
>trouble with definitions; I find that definitions are usually
>poorly worded or drafted. I need to see examples so that I can formulate
>my own (possibly sub-verbal) definitions.
This is intriguing, not to mention somewhat unusual. You mean, most of your
definitions are of your own making? What about those definitions that aren't
"poorly worded or drafted"--do you still have to see examples to formulate your
own definitions? And could you please give an example of one of your
"sub-verbal" definitions?
>Here's an algorithm, though it isn't a definition. [...]
Frankly, I think it's a long shot that "Algorithm your terms" will ever catch
on.
George
John Lawler
>Charles Riggs writes:
>>Richard Fontana writes
>> >This should be intelligently explained in any reasonable
>> >junior-high-school-level textbook on English grammar. I'm all for home
>> >schooling, but I am concerned that in this particular area your child is
>> >getting a deficient education. Either understand what you're talking
>> >about or don't teach it at all.
There is no such thing as a 'reasonable junior-high-school-level textbook
on English grammar', at least not in the United States. English grammar
is not taught in primary or secondary schools in the United States.
Sometimes some mythology is taught under that rubric, but luckily it's
usually ignored, except by the credulous. Most kids can tell a crock when
it's handed to them, in my experience.
>> Yeah, yeah. Instead of this though, can you define passive voice for
>> us? It's been a long time since junior high and the definition is not
>> completely clear to me.
>Actually, no, I can't readily define passive voice, but I can recognize it
>(I know it when I see it, as Potter Stewart said). I leave definitions to
>experts like John Lawler (who, for all I know, might consider conventional
>or traditional understandings of the active and passive voices to be
>bogus). This has something to do with the way my mind works. I have
>trouble with definitions; I find that definitions are usually
>poorly worded or drafted. I need to see examples so that I can formulate
>my own (possibly sub-verbal) definitions.
Definitions are the wrong way to go about grammar. Definitions have to be
ostensive at some point, otherwise they're circular, and they have to be
categorical, otherwise they don't include every instance. But most
putative definitions of grammatical terms aren't ostensive because they
refer to very vague or undefinable phenomena (e.g, in this case, "the
receiver of the action" or something of that ilk, which is useless when
there's no action involved, and vague when you try to decide what
"receiving" means), and they aren't categorical because they usually only
try to describe the clear cases, leaving the grey areas to be argued
about.
Linguists *always* give examples to anchor our terminology, and our
definitions are ostensive wherever possible:
By 'passive' I mean constructions like those in examples (15-26).
Richard has it right; like most linguists, I do consider the conventional
"definitions" to be bogus. He is also right about how to go about
characterizing syntactic phenomena -- they're descriptions of syntactic
constructions, after all, so you just have to say how to construct them.
I.e, an algorithm. That's basically what syntactic rules are:
subroutines.
>Here's an algorithm, though it isn't a definition. You can convert an
>active voice sentence to a passive voice sentence by (1) making the direct
>object of the active voice sentence the subject; (2) making the subject of
>the active voice sentence, if you want to keep it, the object of the
>preposition "by"; and (3) replacing the verb in the original sentence with
>the form of "to be" in the tense used in the original sentence plus the
>past participle.
Footnotes:
[1] Note that the first step calls for a transitive sentence, since
that's the only kind equipped with a direct object.
[2] In certain kinds of sentence that are equipped with indirect
objects, you can promote these to direct object status
*before* promoting the direct object to subject, producing
Bill was given the tickets (by Harry).
instead of
The tickets were given to Bill (by Harry).
[3] The metaphor used by Relational Grammar is "promotion" and "demotion"
(in the case of Passive, promotion of the direct object to subject
status, and demotion of the subject to "chomage" status -- "chomage"
being a French word for 'unemployment'). Relational Grammar is
one of many handy syntactic theories; it's especially good for
those phenomena that deal with the grammatical relations of
subject, direct object, and indirect object.
[4] The (optional) agent 'by'-phrase goes to the end of the unemployment
line, at the end of the sentence. But, since one of the main reasons
for using passive in the first place is to focus on the object
instead of the subject, it's more common to just delete it and
produce an agentless passive:
This building was erected in 1949.
Who cares what the name of the contractor was?
[5] You can tell the promoted object is really the subject in a passive
sentence in English because the verb agrees with it instead of with
the demoted subject. This is not always the case in every language,
however. In Acehnese (spoken in Aceh, which has been in the news a
lot lately) there is a construction very like the English passive
which nevertheless maintains agreement with the demoted subject,
instead of switching to agree with the newly-promoted subject.
I had the honor of discovering this phemonenon, a while back.
This is a good example of the fact that "the passive", like
"the subject", or "the phoneme /r/", is not a universal term, but
instead is relative to each language and must always be discussed in
that context.
[6] The 'be' auxiliary of passive is the last auxiliary in the verb
chain, being preceded (in order) by Modals, perfect 'have', and the
progressive 'be', each of which, like passive 'be', defines the form
of the verb immediately following it. For details, consult
http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/aue/tense.html#vp
One could go on for a long time about passive. It's only apparently
simple, and there are lots of details and individual variations to account
for, like the 'get'-passive, for instance:
Bill got arrested by the Border Patrol.
But for all practical purposes, you don't need more than Charles's
algorithm to characterize the English passive construction.
>Example:
>Charles ogled the wench. => The wench was ogled by Charles.
>It's pretty simple. Coming up with a definition is more difficult, and
>seems to be something that should be left to the professional linguists
>(like John Lawler), from which it can trickle down to us mortals (and to
>writers of high-school English grammar textbooks).
Writers of high-school English grammar textbooks, if there are any of
them, do not pay any attention to linguists, or to the English language,
but rather to textbook publishers, who in turn pay attention to state
school boards and other certifying agencies (who also, needless to say, do
not.. etc.). The result is that HS textbooks are generally useless, and in
the case of English grammar, demonstrably deficient and incorrect as well.
In 34 years of teaching college students (i.e, former American HS students
for the most part), I've found that the only native English speakers who
know squat about English grammar are the ones who've either taken Latin or
studied abroad. Most of the others arrive in college able to tell a noun
from a verb in a simple sentence, and that's it.
Foreign students are a different story; they have to deal with reality
instead of mythology, and they generally know lots more English grammar
than native speakers. I usually try to get them to help the Americans.
-John Lawler http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler Michigan Linguistics Dept
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Because in our brief lives, we catch so little of the vastness of
history, we tend too much to think of language as being solid as a
dictionary, with granite-like permanence, rather than as the rampant
restless sea of metaphor that it is." -- Julian Jaynes
John Lawler
> Peter B. Steiger (see...@for.email.address) writes:
>> Anyway, today's debate came up when she tried to explain to
>> 9.35-year-old why passive voice is a Bad Thing in writing.
>There are times when the passive form definitely is the best. However,
>the overuse of passive verbs makes writing vague, boring, diffuse,
>wordy, and otherwise Not Good.
Notice, it's the *OVERuse* of passive that's a Bad Thing.
The OVERuse of *anything* is a Bad Thing.
The *use* of passive in itself is not a Bad Thing.
We're not doing moral theology here, we're talking about effective
writing.
Simple solution:
For any sentence, for any phrase, for any construction, for any word,
that you are responsible for writing, be prepared to say, on demand:
o precisely what you intended to accomplish by using it,
o what alternatives you considered, and
o why you rejected each of them.
These are standing instructions in my writing classes. In order to do
this, you have to pay attention to what you're writing -- consciously,
instead of simply following prescriptive rules, which are always
overgeneralized anyway.
-John Lawler http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler U of Michigan Linguistics Dept
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a - Edward Sapir
mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations." Language (1921)
K1912
[...]
>There is no such thing as a 'reasonable junior-high-school-level textbook
>on English grammar', at least not in the United States. English grammar
>is not taught in primary or secondary schools in the United States.
>Sometimes some mythology is taught under that rubric, but luckily it's
>usually ignored, except by the credulous. Most kids can tell a crock when
>it's handed to them, in my experience.
[...]
>Writers of high-school English grammar textbooks, if there are any of
>them, do not pay any attention to linguists, or to the English language,
>but rather to textbook publishers, who in turn pay attention to state
>school boards and other certifying agencies (who also, needless to say, do
>not.. etc.). The result is that HS textbooks are generally useless, and in
>the case of English grammar, demonstrably deficient and incorrect as well.
>
Just out of curiosity, to which linguists ought these writers of high-school
English grammar textbooks, if there are any of them, pay attention to when they
write their textbooks? And just how, exactly, would they go about paying
attention "to the English language"?
Of course, if HS textbooks "are generally useless," then so are high schools
themselves--I mean generally useless except for places where students are
inculcated with a hatred for learning. How is it that all normal children are
the most curious creatures imaginable--until they enter the school system? Then
they become the whining school-person, with their satchel and shining morning
face, creeping unwillingly like snail to school and thinking of suicide packs.
But to give high schools their due, there's no denying that they (and colleges)
are a most efficient way of keeping millions of aging moppets out of the work
force and off the streets and out of the homes and safe and sound if they don't
get shot. Seems to me, high-school dropouts are the only kids who can really
"tell a crock when it's handed to them."
>In 34 years of teaching college students (i.e, former American HS students
>for the most part), I've found that the only native English speakers who
>know squat about English grammar are the ones who've either taken Latin or
>studied abroad. Most of the others arrive in college able to tell a noun
>from a verb in a simple sentence, and that's it.
>
>Foreign students are a different story; they have to deal with reality
>instead of mythology, and they generally know lots more English grammar
>than native speakers. I usually try to get them to help the Americans.
>
And do these foreign students who know "lots more English grammar than native
speakers" learn it primarily from textbooks? If so, foreign textbooks must be
reasonable since foreign students know so much more "squat" about English
grammar than native speakers. It follows, then, that the solution to teaching
English grammar to native speakers is simple--the United States ought to import
and distribute to all its high schools the English grammar books that these
foreign students learned from. It also follows that the textbook writers in
foreign countries pay more attention to their linguists. Why do you suppose
that is, John? :)
George
Padraig Breathnach
>... This prohibition on using the passive is
>itself completely bogus, though it seems to be rooted in a sincere effort
>to get students to not use the passive *too much*, and (particularly in
>writing certain kinds of material) to be clear about *who* is responsible
>for particular actions....
>
Hear! Hear! The passive voice exists because it is useful. Agreed, it
is sometimes inappropriately employed, but that does not make it a bad
thing in itself.
...
>Passive:
>John Lawler was attacked by gremlins.
>Charles Riggs is made Man of the Year.
>The war was won by the Reds.
>The medal had been pinned on Arjay's chest but it was ripped off by Cob.
>
>Non-passive:
>John Lawler was a mortal man.
>Charles Riggs is an Irish citizen.
>The war was awful.
>The medal on Arjay's chest was bright and shiny, and Cob was envious.
As language illustrations these are fine. The four examples of the
passive voice might be considered good English.
But two errors of fact about our Charles?
PB
Richard Fontana
> John Lawler wrote:
>
> >There is no such thing as a 'reasonable junior-high-school-level textbook
> >on English grammar', at least not in the United States. English grammar
> >is not taught in primary or secondary schools in the United States.
> >Sometimes some mythology is taught under that rubric, but luckily it's
> >usually ignored, except by the credulous. Most kids can tell a crock when
> >it's handed to them, in my experience.
> [...]
>
> >Writers of high-school English grammar textbooks, if there are any of
> >them, do not pay any attention to linguists, or to the English language,
> >but rather to textbook publishers, who in turn pay attention to state
> >school boards and other certifying agencies (who also, needless to say, do
> >not.. etc.). The result is that HS textbooks are generally useless, and in
> >the case of English grammar, demonstrably deficient and incorrect as well.
>
> Just out of curiosity, to which linguists ought these writers of high-school
> English grammar textbooks, if there are any of them, pay attention to when they
> write their textbooks? And just how, exactly, would they go about paying
> attention "to the English language"?
I can't speak for John Lawler (the Jukebox Hero of Linguistics) but I
suspect that he might be in favor of having something like an introductory
college linguistics course taught at the high school level. (Indeed, I
think that my high school offered linguistics during some years as an
elective; I think it was taught by someone whose main gig was as a
foreign language teacher.) I see no reason why such material would be
inherently inappropriate for high school students; if high school students
can study chemistry and calculus and physics and literature then they can
also study linguistics. It seems to me that one could tailor such
introductory material to the study of English language linguistics
specifically, and this could replace any traditional studies of
"prescriptivist" grammar and mostly nonsensical things like that.
Something would have to be done about that little SAT section where they
test prescriptivist grammar knowledge, if that still is part of the SAT.
Also, maybe the English Achievement Tests (now part of the
euphemistically-named "SAT II", AIUI) and the English AP tests, to the
extent any part of them demands an understanding of prescriptivist grammar
rules (I can't remember) would have to be changed. An argument can be made
that some limited knowledge of traditional prescriptivist grammar helps in
developing good formal writing technique.
Robert Lieblich
>
> Richard Fontana <rf...@sparky.cs.nyu.edu> wrote:
[ . . . ]
> >Passive:
> >John Lawler was attacked by gremlins.
> >Charles Riggs is made Man of the Year.
> >The war was won by the Reds.
> >The medal had been pinned on Arjay's chest but it was ripped off by Cob.
> >
> >Non-passive:
> >John Lawler was a mortal man.
> >Charles Riggs is an Irish citizen.
> >The war was awful.
> >The medal on Arjay's chest was bright and shiny, and Cob was envious.
>
> As language illustrations these are fine. The four examples of the
> passive voice might be considered good English.
>
> But two errors of fact about our Charles?
There are also some things in there about me[1], but he didn't even
spell my name right.
[1] Or Mr. Cunningham, or Mr. Lipton.
Robert Lieblich
[ . . ]
> For any sentence, for any phrase, for any construction, for any word,
> that you are responsible for writing, be prepared to say, on demand:
>
> o precisely what you intended to accomplish by using it,
> o what alternatives you considered, and
> o why you rejected each of them.
>
> These are standing instructions in my writing classes.
I'm not sure I could produce more than a paragraph a day if I
adhered strictly to these instructions. It was all I could do to
stop rewriting the preceding sentence -- or this one. I hope you
don't ask the students for gobs of writing.
> In order to do
> this, you have to pay attention to what you're writing -- consciously,
> instead of simply following prescriptive rules, which are always
> overgeneralized anyway.
This is admirable. I'd be interested to know its practical effects.
Gary Williams
> In 34 years of teaching college students (i.e, former American HS students
> for the most part), I've found that the only native English speakers who
> know squat about English grammar are the ones who've either taken Latin or
> studied abroad. ... Foreign students are a different story; they have to
> deal with reality instead of mythology, and they generally know lots more
> English grammar than native speakers.
But could these foreign students explain the grammar of their own
languages to native speakers of them? Or could their monolingual
countrymen do so? Since most high school students possess enough
grammar to communicate, if on a somewhat primal level, before they
enter school, the systematic ordering of the that grammar and its
technical terminology may not be of much interest or utility.
And this lack of interest doesn't necessarily mean that they can't
write. We learn language by imitation; and the kids who have read
good writers will write well and grammatically without knowing a
single rule of grammar. The effort it takes for me to derive a rule
to explain to a foreign speaker _why_ you must or must not use a
certain construction demonstrates that to my satisfaction. (Well, it
demonstrates it if you grant as a given that I am a competent writer.)
But most people who learn a second language learn it analytically, to
one degree or another. As a result, they get some formal instruction
in the grammar of the target language. And I think it is _this_ that
makes them aware that their native language must have grammar, too;
and that the need to compare and contrast the native grammar with the
new language's grammar is what makes a bit of the native grammar
register with them.
I've probably overstated this case, but I think it's got at least some
validity to it.
Gary Williams
Evan Kirshenbaum
> English grammar is not taught in primary or secondary schools in the
> United States. Sometimes some mythology is taught under that
> rubric, but luckily it's usually ignored, except by the credulous.
Okay. That's going in my sig-quote file. (Barring authorial
objection, of course.)
--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
HP Laboratories |People think it must be fun to be a
1501 Page Mill Road, Building 1U |super genius, but they don't
Palo Alto, CA 94304 |realize how hard it is to put up
|with all the idiots in the world.
kirsh...@hpl.hp.com | Calvin
(650)857-7572
Charles Riggs
wrote:
>As language illustrations these are fine. The four examples of the
>passive voice might be considered good English.
>
>But two errors of fact about our Charles?
Only one that I counted.
Charles Riggs
Charles Riggs
Thank you. I tend to use examples too when remembering rules of
English rather than the rule itself.
Charles Riggs
Franke
Charles Riggs wrote:
Examples ought to make rules unnecessary. And they are no more
than abstract inductions from concrete examples. As teaching aids,
grammar rules are totally useless. Far East Asians have to memorize
and regurgitate for tests literally hundreds of grammar rules, many of
which I have never read or otherwise heard of. As a rule, however,
they do not demonstrate any significant competence with English
or any other foreign languages simply because they learn grammar
rules. Give them examples, and they get the point. Give them rules
and they always come up with exceptions.
Murray Arnow
>
>As a rule, however,
>they do not demonstrate any significant competence with English
>or any other foreign languages simply because they learn grammar
>rules. Give them examples, and they get the point. Give them rules
which proves the rules.
Franke
Murray Arnow wrote:
But they cannot handle the fact that there are exceptions and do not
buy this old saw.
John O'Flaherty
I disagree. Explicitly stating rules makes it much easier to understand
examples, and examples make it much easier to understand rules. They reinforce
each other. Of course, the rules must correctly summarize what is going on, and
their scope must be stated correctly.
--
john
change roast to burnt bread to reply
John Lawler
>jla...@umich.edu (John Lawler) writes:
>> In 34 years of teaching college students (i.e, former American HS students
>> for the most part), I've found that the only native English speakers who
>> know squat about English grammar are the ones who've either taken Latin or
>> studied abroad. ... Foreign students are a different story; they have to
>> deal with reality instead of mythology, and they generally know lots more
>> English grammar than native speakers.
>But could these foreign students explain the grammar of their own
>languages to native speakers of them? Or could their monolingual
>countrymen do so?
Oh, yes. Almost everywhere in the world except in Anglophone areas, the
actual facts about how language works are as uncontroversial as
arithmetic, and are taught and learned as straightforwardly and generally.
As to "monolingual countrymen", most foreign students don't have any. It
is the norm, worldwide, for most people to speak several languages
routinely. The equation of "one country = one language" is a modern
monstrosity, which Americans in particular have bought into so thoroughly
that we don't even know how monstrous it is.
"Illiterate countrymen" is a different matter; there are plenty of
illiterate people in the world (including more Americans than we like to
admit), but one doesn't expect them to be able to discuss fine points of
grammatical theory.
>Since most high school students possess enough
>grammar to communicate, if on a somewhat primal level, before they
>enter school, the systematic ordering of that grammar and its
>technical terminology may not be of much interest or utility.
"Possessing" a grammar in the sense of being able to speak a language is a
species characteristic of H. Sapiens. Knowing anything about it in a
conscious fashion is a rather different kettle of fish. Everybody knows
how to eat, too, yet there are courses in agriculture, dietetics,
nutrition, health, cuisine, etc.
Grammar is far from being a matter of "technical terminology". The
terminology is just there to facilitate discussion of the phenomena and
how they work. Without knowledge of that, the terminology is just so many
magic words to mispronounce and argue about.
>And this lack of interest doesn't necessarily mean that they can't
>write. We learn language by imitation; and the kids who have read
>good writers will write well and grammatically without knowing a
>single rule of grammar. The effort it takes for me to derive a rule
>to explain to a foreign speaker _why_ you must or must not use a
>certain construction demonstrates that to my satisfaction. (Well, it
>demonstrates it if you grant as a given that I am a competent writer.)
The art of looking and interpreting visible phenomena is more or less
inborn; and the art of painting *can* be acquired, even to the master
level, without any serious study of color, chemistry, physiology, design,
or art history. Geniuses happen. For non-geniuses, though, it's very
hard to talk about it usefully that way, and practically impossible to
teach it effectively.
Writing is much the same; it's a technology that builds on but is not the
same as the human ability to talk and understand natural language. It's
not at all the same as talking, and it takes practice to get right. If
you want to be a good writer, you *gotta* pay attention to language, and
if you do, you do a whole lot better if you understand what you're
observing. That's all.
The fact that the study of language is interesting, let alone fun, is
frosting on the cake, as well as the best-kept secret in America.
>But most people who learn a second language learn it analytically, to
>one degree or another. As a result, they get some formal instruction
>in the grammar of the target language. And I think it is _this_ that
>makes them aware that their native language must have grammar, too;
>and that the need to compare and contrast the native grammar with the
>new language's grammar is what makes a bit of the native grammar
>register with them.
That's the way it works in the US. I said "Latin" above because you
*have to* learn formal grammar to study Latin; you can't pick it up by
speaking and listening. Most HS instruction in living languages in the US
is not very successful, for a number of reasons, and thus doesn't usually
result in students getting far enough to understand the grammar of the
target language, let alone reflecting it back on English.
-John Lawler http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler Michigan Linguistics Dept
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magni-
fique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty,
hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French."
-- P. G. Wodehouse
Linz
> jla...@login.itd.umich.edu (John Lawler) wrote in message news:<yGKY6.39$%e2....@news.itd.umich.edu>...
>
> > In 34 years of teaching college students (i.e, former American HS students
> > for the most part), I've found that the only native English speakers who
> > know squat about English grammar are the ones who've either taken Latin or
> > studied abroad. ... Foreign students are a different story; they have to
> > deal with reality instead of mythology, and they generally know lots more
> > English grammar than native speakers.
>
> But could these foreign students explain the grammar of their own
> languages to native speakers of them? Or could their monolingual
> countrymen do so? Since most high school students possess enough
> grammar to communicate, if on a somewhat primal level, before they
> enter school, the systematic ordering of the that grammar and its
> technical terminology may not be of much interest or utility.
One of my friends did her year abroad in France and naturally took her
daughter with her. Her daughter, aged about 8, settled
enthusiastically into a French school and picked up French very
quickly. She had no extra classes, only studied what the rest of her
peers studied. Which included general French grammar. She returned to
the UK at the end of the year with a greater knowledge of "parts of
speech" and grammar than I had when I started at university.
--
...the women on this newsgroup are all fwuffy ickle bunnies and
it is our duty as the hunter/gatherers of Usenet to protect them from
unsavoury characters and ungentlemanly types. (Steve, uly)
Franke
John Lawler wrote:
> Gary Williams <will...@ahec.edu> writes:
> >jla...@umich.edu (John Lawler) writes:
>
> >> In 34 years of teaching college students (i.e, former American HS students
> >> for the most part), I've found that the only native English speakers who
> >> know squat about English grammar are the ones who've either taken Latin or
> >> studied abroad. ... Foreign students are a different story; they have to
> >> deal with reality instead of mythology, and they generally know lots more
> >> English grammar than native speakers.
>
> >But could these foreign students explain the grammar of their own
> >languages to native speakers of them? Or could their monolingual
> >countrymen do so?
>
> Oh, yes. Almost everywhere in the world except in Anglophone areas, the
> actual facts about how language works are as uncontroversial as
> arithmetic, and are taught and learned as straightforwardly and generally.
Not true in Taiwan (bilingual at least in the central, southern, and eastern
parts
(most of the Mainlanders and their progeny here, however, do not speak
Taiwanese, especially in the Taipei area) or, from my experience, in Japan,
where Japanese is almost the only language spoken by almost everyone.
Nobody here learns any Chinese grammar, only English grammar rules,
which is why they can't do anything significant with the language after 6
years of high-school exam hell in English classes. And nobody here
learns Taiwanese grammar either. When I tried teaching English grammar
in Japanese in Tokyo, I discovered that my high school students found
the Japanese terminology as useful as an explanation in Greek.
> As to "monolingual countrymen", most foreign students don't have any. It
> is the norm, worldwide, for most people to speak several languages
> routinely. The equation of "one country = one language" is a modern
> monstrosity, which Americans in particular have bought into so thoroughly
> that we don't even know how monstrous it is.
I've read that most Indians who live in Hindi-speaking areas, speak only
Hindi. I wonder if they can discuss the grammar of their own language.
While I agree with your assessment of the American ignorance of English
grammar and aversion for foreign languages, I think you probably
overstating your case about the linguistic virtues of foreigners.
Franke
John O'Flaherty wrote:
Yes, I agree with you, but you are speaking in abstractions and
I am generalizing from almost 2 decades of concrete experience
with Japanese and Taiwanese high school and college students.
Peter B. Steiger
>I disagree. Explicitly stating rules makes it much easier to understand
>examples, and examples make it much easier to understand rules. They reinforce
>each other. Of course, the rules must correctly summarize what is going on, and
>their scope must be stated correctly.
Indeed. To answer Mr. Fontana, yes, the sources I consulted before
coming here to invite disaster all gave examples - examples which
reinforced what we already understood to define the concept:
"The whale was speared by Ahab."
"The Presidential aide was fondled."
... etc.
However, recall that my original question specifically concerned the
question of whether "be" verbs are part of the canon. None of the
definitions and none of the examples specifically exclude sentences
of the form subject/linking verb/predicate, e.g., "The whale was
white."
I can see where someone could look at the two examples:
The Presidential aide was fondled.
The whale was white.
... and see enough similarity between them to assume that any
rule which applies to the first example would also apply to the
second example.
To that extent, I believe the definitions/examples I have seen in
our collection of textbooks are inadequate. My challenge is to
find an authoritative source which unquestionably demonstrates
by definition or by example that subject/be/adjective or
subject/be/noun is NOT a passive voice construct.
Peter B. Steiger
Cheyenne, WY
----
If you reply by email, send it to pbs at com dot
canada (or vice-versa). All advertisements will be
returned to your postmaster, eh!
Richard Fontana
> To answer Mr. Fontana, yes, the sources I consulted before
> coming here to invite disaster all gave examples - examples which
> reinforced what we already understood to define the concept:
> "The whale was speared by Ahab."
> "The Presidential aide was fondled."
> ... etc.
>
> However, recall that my original question specifically concerned the
> question of whether "be" verbs are part of the canon. None of the
> definitions and none of the examples specifically exclude sentences
> of the form subject/linking verb/predicate, e.g., "The whale was
> white."
>
> I can see where someone could look at the two examples:
> The Presidential aide was fondled.
> The whale was white.
>
> ... and see enough similarity between them to assume that any
> rule which applies to the first example would also apply to the
> second example.
>
> To that extent, I believe the definitions/examples I have seen in
> our collection of textbooks are inadequate. My challenge is to
> find an authoritative source which unquestionably demonstrates
> by definition or by example that subject/be/adjective or
> subject/be/noun is NOT a passive voice construct.
Okay. It's kind of obvious to me, but then I think I first learned about
the passive voice from studying Latin in secondary school.
In all the examples of the passive you give, the sentence corresponds to an
active voice verb, and the correspondence is sort of centered on the verb.
In "The Presidential aide was fondled", the whole verb is "was fondled". I
think you're viewing the verb as just "was". The corresponding active voice
sentence is "[some agent] fondled the Presidential aide". Fondled (active)
corresponds to "was fondled" (passive). Similarly, "The whale was speared
by Ahab" corresponds to the active voice sentence "Ahab speared the whale".
The active voice verb is "speared"; the passive voice verb is "was speared".
In English there's no passive voice form of "to be" corresponding to the
"active voice" form (if it's correct to call it so). You can't say
something like "I am been", "he was been". It's really unclear what
"passiveness" would mean with a verb like "to be"; it seems nonsensical.
But I should really quit while I'm ahead, as this is territory better dealt
with by people like John Lawler (the Mr. Clean of Linguistics).
There's a difference between the "was white" sentence and the "was fondled"
sentence. "Was fondled" and "was speared" are derived forms of the basic
verbs "fondle" and "spear". We can say "Joe fondled the aide" and "Ahab
speared the whale", and we can say "The aide was fondled" and "the whale was
speared by Ahab". But with "to be white", if we regard that as a verb, the
form "Joe was white" is what is analogous to "Joe fondled the aide", as I
see it. And there's no way to make a form that is analogous to "The aide
was fondled [by Joe]" with this putative verb "to be white".
Franke
"Peter B. Steiger" wrote:
> On Sat, 23 Jun 2001 18:18:08 GMT, John O'Flaherty sez:
> >I disagree. Explicitly stating rules makes it much easier to understand
> >examples, and examples make it much easier to understand rules. They reinforce
> >each other. Of course, the rules must correctly summarize what is going on, and
> >their scope must be stated correctly.
>
> Indeed. To answer Mr. Fontana, yes, the sources I consulted before
> coming here to invite disaster all gave examples - examples which
> reinforced what we already understood to define the concept:
> "The whale was speared by Ahab."
> "The Presidential aide was fondled."
> ... etc.
>
> However, recall that my original question specifically concerned the
> question of whether "be" verbs are part of the canon. None of the
> definitions and none of the examples specifically exclude sentences
> of the form subject/linking verb/predicate, e.g., "The whale was
> white."
All the definitions of the passive that Ihave read require a participle,
and "white" is decidely not a participle but an adjective. You cannot
honestly be saying that you found definitions that did not say the
auxialiary verb BE + PAST PARTICIPLE. The fact that none of the
examples specificially exclude sentences like "The whale was
white" is because all the other example sentences you saw included
only participles where you have included an adjective. Omission in
this case is sufficient to exclude SUBJ+BE+ADJ constructions, unless
the ADJ=PAST PARTICIPLE, e.g., "The whale was tired".
This kind of construction is called a "statal passive", by the way, so
your wife gets a point here. However, according to a linguist in
Ireland (Clodagh Lynam, Linguistics Dept, University College Dublin,
Belfield , Dublin 4, Republic of Ireland) in an untitled paper on the Web
at: <http://www.ucd.ie/~linguist/pass.html>, if you care to read it. Here
are a couple of his concluding remarks with my comments attached.
"I have assumed, following Guilfoyle (1989) and others, that
the passive proper, which has a dynamic reading and
a verbal participle, has the same argument structure as
active clauses do." If you can analyze "The whale was white"
as a sentence with a dynamic reading and a verbal participle,
then you can turn it into a passive; but you cannot--convincingly,
at least. The argument structure of this sentence is quite
different from that "The whale was captured".
"Adjectival passives are, in fact, not passives at all, but
predicative adjective constructions. They differ from passives
proper in that they have a different syntactic structure and a
different thematic structure; in particular, in my analysis, they
have no implicit agent." No agent in the "The whale was white"
sentence, but there is one in the "The whale was captured"
sentence: Ahab or some other whaler is the implied agent.
In the "The whale was tired" sentence, there is no implied
agent. This is what is called a statal passive, but Mr Lynham
denies that it is a passive at all, but a predicate adjective
construction just like "The whale was white"--the only difference
being that one adjective is a past participle and the other is not.
"There is a lexical derivational rule for the formation of
participial adjectives, which involves morphological changes,
changes in the thematic structure of the item and a change of
category. I have suggested that the change of category and
the suppression of the external theta-role are connected;
the presence of an Actor/Experiencer theta-role, I suggest,
only allows for a dynamic interpretation, which is what we would
expect from a verb, but not from an adjective. An adjective never
has an Actor/Experiencer theta-index to assign. Participial
adjectives may then appear either prenominally or as
complement to verbs like be or become (with some constraints)."
If you care to read this kind of highly technical paper just to be
certain that something is or is not a passive, here it is, but I
don't think it is really necessary when the kinds of passives
eveyone is taught to avoid overusing are the kinds that can
be translated into pleasant, vigorous, and dynamic active
voice sentences like "Ahab caught the whale" and not
*"Someone whited the whale". Oh, sure, if you want to
create a sentence like ?"Something tired the whale" out of
"The whale was tired", that is okay, but it makes no sense
if the intent of the sentence is to describe a characteristic
or trait of the whale, like "whiteness". And if you say "The
whale was very tired", you cannot then turn it into
*"Something very tired the whale". The BE verb before an
adjective is a copular verb, a stative verb used to describe
a state of being, not someone or something performing an
action or an action performed performed by someone or
something.
Of course, the whale was tired for a reason, but for the
purpose of description, the reason is of no consequence.
Were it of consequence, a dynamic construction would
have to be used.
> I can see where someone could look at the two examples:
> The Presidential aide was fondled.
> The whale was white.
>
> ... and see enough similarity between them to assume that any
> rule which applies to the first example would also apply to the
> second example.
As I said above, the predicates are totally different. The first
sentence describes an action--is dynamic--and the second
describes a trait (color) and is static. This is what I believe
Prof Fontana meant, and I know is it what I meant, by "If you
don't understand what you're teaching, don't teach it". One
need not be a linguist to see the significant differences in these
two sentences.
> To that extent, I believe the definitions/examples I have seen in
> our collection of textbooks are inadequate.
I haven't found any grammar books that bother to say how and
why these two types of sentences are different. Once the parts
of speech are discussed and terms like "attibutive" and
"predicate" and "participial" are applied to adjectives and
examples of each are shown, there is no reason to discuss
sentences with non-participial adjectives when talking about
the passive voice. It's a lot like saying "Remember, now,
ducks go 'quack, quack' and crows go 'caw, caw'".
> My challenge is to
> find an authoritative source which unquestionably demonstrates
> by definition or by example that subject/be/adjective or
> subject/be/noun is NOT a passive voice construct.
Clodagh Lynam is your man, your authoritative source, if you can
follow his argument. That academics were still arguing about this
kind of thing in 1990 (the date of his paper) is a very strong signal
that says: "There is no such authority. If you want that kind of
authority, you have to ask God".
John O'Flaherty
You agree with what I said but I'm not qualified to say it? OK. Cool.
Examples, to be useful, have to be examples of something more general than just
themselves. What they are examples of can be stated in rules. To the degree that
there are exceptions to the rules, to that degree the examples don't apply either.
Both are different expressions of an underlying truth. Anyone who has ever had to
learn anything can understand that, whether they've taught anyone but themselves or
not.
Dennis Bathory-Kitsz
>
> I haven't found any grammar books that bother to say how and
> why these two types of sentences are different. Once the parts
> of speech are discussed and terms like "attibutive" and
> "predicate" and "participial" are applied to adjectives and
> examples of each are shown, there is no reason to discuss
> sentences with non-participial adjectives when talking about
> the passive voice. It's a lot like saying "Remember, now,
> ducks go 'quack, quack' and crows go 'caw, caw'".
Can you explain your post, or even this section, in terms brief and
clear enough to hold the attention of a high-school age child?
This has been a long and complex thread that makes evident (at least to
me) that passive voice and similar-looking structures are in fact not
clear, easily defined, or well exampled. [:)]
As a facilitator, when faced with this sort of situation, I ask this
question: "You're on CNN. You have 15 seconds to explain this. Go." Care
to try?
Dennis
Padraig Breathnach
>This kind of construction is called a "statal passive", by the way, so
>your wife gets a point here. However, according to a linguist in
>Ireland (Clodagh Lynam, Linguistics Dept, University College Dublin,
>Belfield , Dublin 4, Republic of Ireland) in an untitled paper on the Web
>at: <http://www.ucd.ie/~linguist/pass.html>, if you care to read it. Here
>are a couple of his concluding remarks with my comments attached.
>
Nothing to do with passives: the appropriate personal pronoun is
"her".
>"I have assumed, following Guilfoyle (1989) and others, that
>the passive proper, which has a dynamic reading and
>a verbal participle, has the same argument structure as
>active clauses do." If you can analyze "The whale was white"
>as a sentence with a dynamic reading and a verbal participle,
>then you can turn it into a passive; but you cannot--convincingly,
>at least. The argument structure of this sentence is quite
>different from that "The whale was captured".
>
>"Adjectival passives are, in fact, not passives at all, but
>predicative adjective constructions. They differ from passives
>proper in that they have a different syntactic structure and a
>different thematic structure; in particular, in my analysis, they
>have no implicit agent." No agent in the "The whale was white"
>sentence, but there is one in the "The whale was captured"
>sentence: Ahab or some other whaler is the implied agent.
>In the "The whale was tired" sentence, there is no implied
>agent. This is what is called a statal passive, but Mr Lynham
>denies that it is a passive at all, but a predicate adjective
>construction just like "The whale was white"--the only difference
>being that one adjective is a past participle and the other is not.
>
This makes sense to me, but I imagine that there are many instances
where one might argue about the existence of an implicit agent, as in
one of our earlier examples: "Marco Polo was tired after his journey".
So the argument goes on.
>Clodagh Lynam is your man, your authoritative source, if you can
>follow his argument. That academics were still arguing about this
>kind of thing in 1990 (the date of his paper) is a very strong signal
>that says: "There is no such authority. If you want that kind of
>authority, you have to ask God".
>
"Your authoritative source", yes. "Your man", I think not!
PB
Franke
John O'Flaherty wrote:
This is your interpretation of what I meant. I didn't say you were not
qualified to say it. As a writing teacher, I would say that your paragraph
has a good thesis, but it is not sufficiently developed. It needs examples
and illustrations to clearly show your reader what you mean.
What I meant was quite simply that I like to have rules as well as
examples, just as you obviously do: I learn better when I have both the
rule and the concrete example, but that does not mean that everyone
does, especially my East Asian students who have been taught that if
they memorize the rules of English grammar they will be able to read,
write, understand, and speak English like a native speaker even if they
don't understand the meanings of the rules. They are almost all afraid to
speak because they constantly think about whether their grammar
is correct or not.
If I could revamp the English education systems in Taiwan and Japan, I would
teach only the most basic grammar necessary to EFL students and then have
them read, write, speak, and listen as much as possible, correcting their
writing and speaking mistakes with usage examples and, if and when
necessary, rules that cover what they need to have corrected. Right now all
they crave is rules and more rules, but they are no more help to them now
than they were in high school.
I don't know if you have taught English to Far East Asian students, but if you
have, then you know that they are amazingly different from European, South
and Central American, Middle-Eastern, and African students of English. The
cultures of teaching and learning in Far East Asia a substantially different
from those in the West, and their expectations in the classroom are far
different from those of Western students.
J. W. Love
(at least to me) that passive voice and similar-looking structures are in fact
not clear, easily defined, or well exampled. [:)]>>
Amen! But let me fearlessly try some examples, building on the unfortunately
given foundation:
1. The whale was whiting the ocean.
2. The whale was whited by Ahab.
3. The whale was white.
In traditional schooling, sentence 1 is active, sentence 2 is passive, and
sentence 3 is neither (call it copulative?). These sentences exhibit distinct
forms, unaffected by their "meanings" (if they have "meanings").
After checking numerous sources, Peter B. Steiger wrote: <<None of the
definitions and none of the examples specifically exclude sentences of the form
subject/linking verb/predicate, e.g., "The whale was white.">>
Don't they define the FORM of the English passive as involving the verb _be_
and a past participle? Note that _white_ isn't a participle.
John Lawler
Re:
>> The Presidential aide was fondled.
>> The whale was white.
>In all the examples of the passive you give, the sentence corresponds to an
>active voice verb, and the correspondence is sort of centered on the verb.
>In "The Presidential aide was fondled", the whole verb is "was fondled". I
>think you're viewing the verb as just "was". The corresponding active voice
>sentence is "[some agent] fondled the Presidential aide". Fondled (active)
>corresponds to "was fondled" (passive). Similarly, "The whale was speared
>by Ahab" corresponds to the active voice sentence "Ahab speared the whale".
>The active voice verb is "speared"; the passive voice verb is "was speared".
The usual description of the passive construction includes a form of the
auxiliary verb 'be', followed by the past participle form of the main
verb. That's necessary, but not sufficient, to identify passive, because
the past participle form of the verb is not uniquely distinctive. There
are many adjectives that are derived from and have the same shape as the
past participle form of some verb, and if they can occur as predicate
adjectives, as most adjectives can, they occur after a form of the
auxiliary verb 'be', which carries the tense, person, and number
inflections.
There are tests that distinguish between an adjective and a participle.
An adjective (but not a participle) can occur with the intensifier 'very':
A very white whale was discovered in the press room.
*A very fondled aide was discovered in the press room.
The passive allows an optional agent phrase with 'by':
*The whale was white by the spokesman.
The aide was fondled by the spokesman.
There's a difference here between 'opened' and 'closed'. 'Closed' is
ambiguous between a participle and an adjective, while 'opened' is only a
participle, since the adjective 'open' exists to constrast with it.
The door was open. (= an open door)
The door was opened. (= somebody opened it)
The door was closed. (ambiguous)
In one sense, 'closed' is the participle of the active verb 'close', and
the construction is passive. On this reading, we're talking about an event
that took place in the past:
The door was closed by the first lady.
=The first lady closed the door.
In the other sense, 'closed' is a stative adjective describing the
condition of a door, with no necessary reference to any event of closing
(a closed door need never have been open at all).
The 'very' and 'by Harry' tests show this up:
The door was very open. *The door was open by Harry.
*The door was very opened. The door was opened by Harry.
The door was very closed. The door was closed by Harry.
The last pair are both good, but have different senses, because of the
ambiguity of 'closed'.
Historically, many adjectives come from participles, and may retain the
form without retaining the grammatical function. Since English has almost
no inflection left, it's not a good clue to grammar anymore. You have to
pay attention to the syntactic constructions, not the canonical shapes of
words.
-John Lawler http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler Michigan Linguistics Dept
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind." -- Kipling
R H Draney
news:20010624150438...@ng-bj1.aol.com...
Japanese (if anything can be learned by switching languages altogether) has
two different sorts of words that are usually called "adjectives" in
English...one form behaves very much as an English adjective, in that the
copula (here, "desu" and its conjugations) takes all the burden of
negatives, tenses, moods, etc:
"Kasa wa kirei desu" = "The umbrella is pretty"
"Kasa wa kirei deshita" = "The umbrella *was* pretty"
The other set of adjectives is somewhat verb-like, and changes tense and
such while the copula (assuming it's spoken at all) remains fixed:
"Kasa wa akai desu" = "The umbrella is red"
"Kasa wa akakatta desu" = "The umbrella *was* red" (one might translate
this as "The umbrella is 'used-to-be-red'" to emphasize this syntax)....
It's hard for an English monoglot to get his brain around the idea of saying
things like "red" or "hot" in an imperative mood ("Whiten that whale!"?)...I
use this as an example of the ways one's language affects one's perception
of the world...if you find this easy, you should have no trouble with lambda
calculus....
For the record, Japanese has an infix devoted to what in English is the
passive voice, another which corresponds roughly to the difference between
transitive and intransitive forms of the same verb, and which can be used in
combination with each other or any other tense markers...one can say the
equivalent of "The whale was white", "The whale whitened [itself]",
"[Something] whitened the whale", or "The whale was whitened [by
something]", all different verb forms...a *richly* inflected language, that
one....r
Evan Kirshenbaum
> Oh, yes. Almost everywhere in the world except in Anglophone areas, the
> actual facts about how language works are as uncontroversial as
> arithmetic, and are taught and learned as straightforwardly and generally.
Interestingly, I was just speaking to my next-door neighbor, a native
speaker of Ukrainian, who speaks English well, but with a thick
accent. He was talking about how, in Ukrainian, with all the
inflections and freer word orders, it was hard to come up with rules
for when you said what, as there seemed to be more exceptions than
rules.
Sure, the basic "grammar" is straightforward, but that obviously
doesn't, in the mind of a native speaker, actually account for the
rules that govern how people speak.
> As to "monolingual countrymen", most foreign students don't have
> any. It is the norm, worldwide, for most people to speak several
> languages routinely. The equation of "one country = one language"
> is a modern monstrosity, which Americans in particular have bought
> into so thoroughly that we don't even know how monstrous it is.
I'm very curious about this. Do you have data to back it up? In
particular, is there data on bilingualism levels among people who grow
up in households speaking the majority language of their country? And
how much of the choice of second language can be attributed to the
second language being (1) currently globally or regionally important,
(2) the majority language of a nearby neighboring country, (3) locally
the majority language, or (4) very closely related to the first?
Are levels of bilingualism (ignoring English, which is currently the
vogue lingua franca) that much higher in the middle of Spanish-
speaking Latin America, China, or Russia that much higher than in the
US?
Bilingualism where I live seems pretty high. Josh is one of only two
kids on our block growing up in a monolingual household. (The others
are bilingual in Mandarin, Lithuanian, Tagalog, and Ukrainian.) But
between these kids and the fact that I think that the majority of the
neighborhood is either bilingual or monolingual in Spanish (including
a couple of his close friends), I'll be very surprised if he makes it
through the first few years of school without picking up another one.
Of course, we're very near two linguistic borders (with Mexico and
with Asia) and we have a *lot* of immigration (I could probably tick
off a dozen native languages at work without leaving my lab). In the
midwest it was a different story, but even there we were required (in
Chicago) to take Spanish as a second language and strongly encouraged
to take one of the three offered languages in high school. (Which, of
course, is too late to really build competence.)
--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
HP Laboratories |We never met anyone who believed in
1501 Page Mill Road, Building 1U |fortune cookies. That's astounding.
Palo Alto, CA 94304 |Belief in the precognitive powers
|of an Asian pastry is really no
kirsh...@hpl.hp.com |wackier than belief in ESP,
(650)857-7572 |sublaxation, or astrology, but you
|just don't hear anyone preaching
|Scientific Cookie-ism.
| Penn and Teller
J. W. Love
intensifier 'very'. . . .
<<'Opened' is only a participle, since the adjective 'open' exists to
constrast with it. . . .
<<*The door was very opened.>>
Curiously, a Google search for "very opened" turns up 792 hits. Many involve
_opened minded,_ like this:
"Hi, I'm A white male 5' 7" 155lbs single and own home and A very very, opened
minded person."
"It also helps to have a bird who is very opened minded when it comes to
food!"
But these sorts of examples also turn up:
"And the houses are huts, very opened."
"Well. she's very opened as well, and she said, 'Make sure you're ready'."
"Koestner said she strives to be 'very opened, not guarded with people now'."
"The LOMO is equipped an objective wide angle of 32mm, very opened for its
range of price, f / 2,8."
"Hot country - hot-tempered people, very opened to the west traditions,
culture and lifestyle."
"He said that students of his university were very opened to welcoming the
students from Denmark."
" Most of the students are very simple and very opened to us. They just
believe into the Lord."
R J Valentine
...
} That's the way it works in the US. I said "Latin" above because you
} *have to* learn formal grammar to study Latin; you can't pick it up by
} speaking and listening.
Praeceptis salutaribus moniti, et divina institutione formati, audemus
dicere: "Qui dicit?"
} Most HS instruction in living languages in the US
} is not very successful, for a number of reasons, and thus doesn't usually
} result in students getting far enough to understand the grammar of the
} target language, let alone reflecting it back on English.
Could that be because the students are ten or fifteen years too old?
How successful is HS instruction in English outside English America?
--
R. J. Valentine <mailto:r...@smart.net>
Franke
"J. W. Love" wrote:
> John Lawler wrote: <<An adjective (but not a participle) can occur with the
> intensifier 'very'. . . .
> <<'Opened' is only a participle, since the adjective 'open' exists to
> constrast with it. . . .
> <<*The door was very opened.>>
>
> Curiously, a Google search for "very opened" turns up 792 hits. Many involve
> _opened minded,_ like this:
This is a mistake, as is every one of the examples below
Franke
Padraig Breathnach wrote:
> Franke <fra...@seed.net.tw> wrote:
>
> >This kind of construction is called a "statal passive", by the way, so
> >your wife gets a point here. However, according to a linguist in
> >Ireland (Clodagh Lynam, Linguistics Dept, University College Dublin,
> >Belfield , Dublin 4, Republic of Ireland) in an untitled paper on the Web
> >at: <http://www.ucd.ie/~linguist/pass.html>, if you care to read it. Here
> >are a couple of his concluding remarks with my comments attached.
> >
> Nothing to do with passives: the appropriate personal pronoun is
> "her".
Thank you, Padraig. I did wonder about that.
> >"I have assumed, following Guilfoyle (1989) and others, that
> >the passive proper, which has a dynamic reading and
> >a verbal participle, has the same argument structure as
> >active clauses do." If you can analyze "The whale was white"
> >as a sentence with a dynamic reading and a verbal participle,
> >then you can turn it into a passive; but you cannot--convincingly,
> >at least. The argument structure of this sentence is quite
> >different from that "The whale was captured".
> >
> >"Adjectival passives are, in fact, not passives at all, but
> >predicative adjective constructions. They differ from passives
> >proper in that they have a different syntactic structure and a
> >different thematic structure; in particular, in my analysis, they
> >have no implicit agent." No agent in the "The whale was white"
> >sentence, but there is one in the "The whale was captured"
> >sentence: Ahab or some other whaler is the implied agent.
> >In the "The whale was tired" sentence, there is no implied
> >agent. This is what is called a statal passive, but Mr Lynham
> >denies that it is a passive at all, but a predicate adjective
> >construction just like "The whale was white"--the only difference
> >being that one adjective is a past participle and the other is not.
> >
> This makes sense to me, but I imagine that there are many instances
> where one might argue about the existence of an implicit agent, as in
> one of our earlier examples: "Marco Polo was tired after his journey".
> So the argument goes on.
I think almost everyone would assume that the "agent" here is
the journey, but the distinction that Ms Lynham makes is
a grammatical one, as in the sentence "It is raining", which has
a grammatical subject ("it), a pronoun that refers to nothing
concrete and that performs no action. In Japanese, this
sentence would be either "Ame [rain] ga [particle: subject marker]
futte iru [is falling]" or, in shorthand, "Ame desu [it is rain]". In the
first
Japanese sentence, the subject is doing something--falling--that
makes logical sense. In the English "It is raining", nothing--"it"--is
"raining", but rain is falling--not very logical.
But there is no verb in the Marco Polo sentence that takes an agent,
only a participle-derived predicate adjective. To quote Prof Lawler's
post in this thread on this:
"the past participle form of the verb is not uniquely distinctive. There
are many adjectives that are derived from and have the same shape as the
past participle form of some verb, and if they can occur as predicate
adjectives, as most adjectives can, they occur after a form of the
auxiliary verb 'be', which carries the tense, person, and number
inflections.
There are tests that distinguish between an adjective and a participle.
An adjective (but not a participle) can occur with the intensifier 'very':"
So to assign an agent to the BE verb is a misunderstanding of
the grammar of the sentence.
Franke
Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:
I think that both Prof Lawler's statement in an earlier post:
"the past participle form of the verb is not uniquely distinctive. There
are many adjectives that are derived from and have the same shape as the
past participle form of some verb, and if they can occur as predicate
adjectives, as most adjectives can, they occur after a form of the
auxiliary verb 'be', which carries the tense, person, and number
inflections.
There are tests that distinguish between an adjective and a participle.
An adjective (but not a participle) can occur with the intensifier 'very':"
and J W Love's post in response to yours do the job quite nicely.
That we cannot simply and very briefly explain all the grammar
of English or any other language is demonstration enough to me
that dragging out the rules is not the best way to teach or explain
the way the language is actually used. My syntax mentor, Prof
Andreas Koutsoudas, and Prof Lawler would probably both agree
on the sufficiency of the test both Prof Lawler and Quirk et al use
to distinguish a past participle from a predicate adjective used
with the copula: "If you can add 'very', it's an adjective, not a
participle, and the construction is not a passive".
Franke
"J. W. Love" wrote:
Neither are "whiting" and "whited" as "white" is not a verb.
Franke
Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:
I think that Prof Lawler's statement in an earlier post does the job
quite nicely:
"the past participle form of the verb is not uniquely distinctive. There
are many adjectives that are derived from and have the same shape as the
past participle form of some verb, and if they can occur as predicate
adjectives, as most adjectives can, they occur after a form of the
auxiliary verb 'be', which carries the tense, person, and number
inflections.
There are tests that distinguish between an adjective and a participle.
An adjective (but not a participle) can occur with the intensifier 'very':"
That we cannot simply and very briefly explain all the grammar
of English or any other language is demonstration enough to me
that dragging out the rules is not the best way to teach or explain
the way the language is actually used. My syntax mentor, Prof
Andreas Koutsoudas, and Prof Lawler would probably both agree
on the sufficiency of the test both Prof Lawler and Quirk et al use
to distinguish a past participle from a predicate adjective used
with the copula: "If you can add 'very', it's an adjective, not a
participle, and the construction is not a passive".
[Revision: After rereading JW Love's post, I don't think it works
as well as I thought it did upon first glance.]
J. W. Love
??? That would be news to Webster and the OED.
Donna Richoux
[Quoting Franke <fra...@seed.net.tw>]
> <<Neither are "whiting" and "whited" [participles,] as "white" is not a
verb.>>
>
> ??? That would be news to Webster and the OED.
Merriam-Webster marks it as archaic, though. It meant the same as
"whiten."
--
Best --- Donna Richoux
J. W. Love
Right, and except with _out_ (as in _white out_) it may well be archaic or
otherwise unusual. The original point was about the form, not the meaning.
Maybe the home-schooled little Steigers could try their active-passive-stative
comprehension on sentences in these forms.---
1. The whale was braffing the waves.
2. The whale was braffed by Ahab.
3. The whale was braff.
4. The whale was braffer than Ahab.
Franke
> <<Neither are "whiting" and "whited" [participles,] as "white" is not a verb.>>
>
> ??? That would be news to Webster and the OED.
Okay, you are playing Part-of-Speech Scrabble and
I was not aware that "white" was a verb. You get 2
points. Did you know that "to white" was a verb
before you used it? If you did, then which meaning
of the verb did you intend? Do other people on that
side of the pond use this verb with any perceptible
degree of frequency?
The only time I have heard or used anything close
the verb "to white" is when I have heard "Rinso Blue
whitens your clothes like no other"--and Americans
have been using "to whiten" for at least the past
40-50 years. We do not, as far as I know, use "to white"
as a verb. At least I've never read or heard it during the
past half century. We do say "I whited it out" when
talking about covering something with WhiteOut, but
that is a different verb altogether, the phrasal verb
"to white out".
I've never heard an Ameican speaker say or read where
any American speaker has used the verb "to white"
instead of saying or writing "to whittle", the normal AmE
verb for this action.
Main Entry: 4white
Pronunciation:*
Function:transitive verb
Inflected Form:-ed/-ing/-s
Etymology:Middle English whiten, from 1white
: WHITEN
Main Entry: 5white
Pronunciation:
Function:verb
Inflected Form:-ed/-ing/-s
Etymology:alteration of obsolete thwite,
from Middle English thwiten * more at WHITTLE
Britain : CUT, WHITTLE
It isn't a verb on this side of the pond, only on that.
In any case, despite the remotest of possibilities that anyone
would attempt to demonstrate the usage of the passive or any
other standard English gammar point by using obscure words
that most English speakers are unaware of, the 2 verbs "to white"
have nothing to do with the adjective "white" in your post. The
proper adjective to have used is "whited", whether you meant
"whittled" or "whitened", because, as you can see from the
MW3rd entries above, these two verbs have past participles
that end in -ed.
If you had said:
1. The whale was whiting the ocean. [You would, of course,
first have to explain what you meant by the whale "whiting" the
ocean. "Whittling" would be out and in an ocean, the whale
would be too small to "whiten" it, except in someone's over-
active imagination]
2. The whale was whited by Ahab. [You would, of course,
have to explain what you meant by this as well. Did Ahab
"whiten" the whale (No, the whale was white before Ahab
ran into him), or did Ahab "whittle" the whale? Perhaps he
did, but the whale did not whittle the ocean, so there is no
way you can claim to be using the same verb in these two
sentences]
3. The whale was whited. [This is the proper adjectival
form of both the verbs you used in 1 and 2 above. Whether
this is being used as a simple predicate adjective or as a
passive depends first of all on the meaning of the verb "to
white". If it means "to whittle", then you cannot place the
intensifier "very" in front of it: *The whale was very whittled.
If it means "to whiten", then you might have arguements
with people who could claim that "white" is an ungradable
adjective because any "shade of white", eg off-white or
antique white, is in fact not white at all.]
Be that as it may, "whited" (pp & adj) and "white" (adj) are
two different words. Because the latter is not connected
with the two verbs "to whiten", and because neither actor
could perform both actions represented by the two verbs
"to white", your example fails to clarify the issue; in fact,
it only muddles the question all the more.
Franke
"J. W. Love" wrote:
From what the father said, his daughter probably
has a better grasp of it than either of the parents.
Don't you think that it is easier for a 9-year-old boy
to deal with concrete verbs he knows than with
the abstraction of a word he does not know? And, if
he's anything like his father, he will demand an
authoritative source for "to braff". :-)
John O'Flaherty
The grammar texts I have seen are like the mathematics texts I've seen. They present
rules, and then they give examples that illustrate the rules. Then they present
exercises, which require the learner to complete incomplete examples by applying the rule
that was just presented.
It has been my experience that I can read a rule, and even if I understand the terms it
contains, it sits like an undigested lump in my mind, until I start considering the
examples. Then, more or less gradually, the significance of the rule is planted. If I saw
only the examples, it would be harder to extract the concept presented, because examples
may embody more principles than the one under discussion, and things like exceptions and
scope are more easily expressed explicitly in a rule than through examples. I think both
rules and examples are important to internalize some aspect of grammar, but are
insufficient to convey fluency.
> What I meant was quite simply that I like to have rules as well as
> examples, just as you obviously do: I learn better when I have both the
> rule and the concrete example, but that does not mean that everyone
> does, especially my East Asian students who have been taught that if
> they memorize the rules of English grammar they will be able to read,
> write, understand, and speak English like a native speaker even if they
> don't understand the meanings of the rules. They are almost all afraid to
> speak because they constantly think about whether their grammar
> is correct or not.
You seemed to be saying that examples should make rules unnecessary, and that grammar
rules are totally useless. If I misunderstood, sorry.
> If I could revamp the English education systems in Taiwan and Japan, I would
> teach only the most basic grammar necessary to EFL students and then have
> them read, write, speak, and listen as much as possible, correcting their
> writing and speaking mistakes with usage examples and, if and when
> necessary, rules that cover what they need to have corrected. Right now all
> they crave is rules and more rules, but they are no more help to them now
> than they were in high school.
>
> I don't know if you have taught English to Far East Asian students, but if you
> have, then you know that they are amazingly different from European, South
> and Central American, Middle-Eastern, and African students of English. The
> cultures of teaching and learning in Far East Asia a substantially different
> from those in the West, and their expectations in the classroom are far
> different from those of Western students.
Well, then maybe the U.S. isn't that bad by comparison with _all_ the other countries.
Wayne Brown
news:upubto...@hpl.hp.com...
> jla...@login.itd.umich.edu (John Lawler) writes:
>
> > Oh, yes. Almost everywhere in the world except in Anglophone areas, the
> > actual facts about how language works are as uncontroversial as
> > arithmetic, and are taught and learned as straightforwardly and
generally.
>
> Interestingly, I was just speaking to my next-door neighbor, a native
> speaker of Ukrainian, who speaks English well, but with a thick
> accent. He was talking about how, in Ukrainian, with all the
> inflections and freer word orders, it was hard to come up with rules
> for when you said what, as there seemed to be more exceptions than
> rules.
>
> Sure, the basic "grammar" is straightforward, but that obviously
> doesn't, in the mind of a native speaker, actually account for the
> rules that govern how people speak.
There are two gigantic hurdles to overcome when learning Ukrainian: first,
the highly complicated rules on how nouns and adjectives are declined, how
to conjugate verbs in their various aspects and what endings to put on other
parts of speech; second, syntax. After you've learned all the intricate
basic forms and form your first sentence, a Ukrainian says: "What you just
said was grammatically correct, but a Ukrainian would never express your
idea in that manner. We would say that like this..."
> > As to "monolingual countrymen", most foreign students don't have
> > any. It is the norm, worldwide, for most people to speak several
> > languages routinely. The equation of "one country = one language"
> > is a modern monstrosity, which Americans in particular have bought
> > into so thoroughly that we don't even know how monstrous it is.
>
> I'm very curious about this. Do you have data to back it up? In
> particular, is there data on bilingualism levels among people who grow
> up in households speaking the majority language of their country? And
> how much of the choice of second language can be attributed to the
> second language being (1) currently globally or regionally important,
> (2) the majority language of a nearby neighboring country, (3) locally
> the majority language, or (4) very closely related to the first?
>
> Are levels of bilingualism (ignoring English, which is currently the
> vogue lingua franca) that much higher in the middle of Spanish-
> speaking Latin America, China, or Russia that much higher than in the
> US?
Probably not. At least in my experience. But I've been surprised several
times to run across Russians in the wilds of Eastern Siberia who had learned
German at their local school and knew the language well. In China,
surrounded by more than a billion Chinese, the foreigner visitor slowly gets
the feeling that every human being on the face of the earth must speak one
of the variations of Chinese and no other language.
> Bilingualism where I live seems pretty high. Josh is one of only two
> kids on our block growing up in a monolingual household. (The others
> are bilingual in Mandarin, Lithuanian, Tagalog, and Ukrainian.) But
> between these kids and the fact that I think that the majority of the
> neighborhood is either bilingual or monolingual in Spanish (including
> a couple of his close friends), I'll be very surprised if he makes it
> through the first few years of school without picking up another one.
> Of course, we're very near two linguistic borders (with Mexico and
> with Asia) and we have a *lot* of immigration (I could probably tick
> off a dozen native languages at work without leaving my lab). In the
> midwest it was a different story, but even there we were required (in
> Chicago) to take Spanish as a second language and strongly encouraged
> to take one of the three offered languages in high school. (Which, of
> course, is too late to really build competence.)
Bilingualism is an interesting issue. As I understand the word, it means
being able to use two languages with *equal* or nearly equal fluency -- a
tough test, in my opinion.
Regards,-----WB.
Franke
John O'Flaherty wrote:
> [snipt for brevity's sake]
> You seemed to be saying that examples should make rules unnecessary, and that grammar
> rules are totally useless. If I misunderstood, sorry.
Simple rules, general rules I have no problem with, but as we have seen in
this thread, there are so many rules that define what is and is not a passive
that finally they seem to be more confusing than helpful for all but the most
deeply interested linguistic scholars. East Asian students rely so heavily
on rules (because that is what they have been taught that English is) that
they want to know the rules. The rules don't help them. For them alone I
would eliminate learning any more rules and use examples. I apologize that
I did not make myself more clear the first time.
> > If I could revamp the English education systems in Taiwan and Japan, I would
> > teach only the most basic grammar necessary to EFL students and then have
> > them read, write, speak, and listen as much as possible, correcting their
> > writing and speaking mistakes with usage examples and, if and when
> > necessary, rules that cover what they need to have corrected. Right now all
> > they crave is rules and more rules, but they are no more help to them now
> > than they were in high school.
> >
> > I don't know if you have taught English to Far East Asian students, but if you
> > have, then you know that they are amazingly different from European, South
> > and Central American, Middle-Eastern, and African students of English. The
> > cultures of teaching and learning in Far East Asia a substantially different
> > from those in the West, and their expectations in the classroom are far
> > different from those of Western students.
>
> Well, then maybe the U.S. isn't that bad by comparison with _all_ the other countries.
I think you are right about that. I did say something
to that effect in my response to Prof Lawler's lamentation
about American language education. But he appears to
have gone to high school in the USA when one had
to learn at least one foreign language to graduate with a
HS diploma. So did I. And then to get into college it was
also necessary to study at least one language for at least
two years, unless you tested out by showing sufficient
proficiency with the language on the SAT afternoon
language test. I got credit for one semester of German,
not very proficient.
It seems clear that public-school language
education in the USA has suffered from an anti-intellectual
and isolationist attitude since the 70s. Thanks to a lot of
well-intentioned students (and maybe a lot not-so-
well-intentioned) and their sympathetic teachers, and to a
bevy of intimidated administrators, education in the USA
got revamped and dumbed down; universities--especially
public universities--were transmogrified into plastic treadmills
of remediation for the alternatively intelligent and alternatively
prepared for academic life. Foreign language requirements
got dropped for all but those in PhD programs. English
grammar was eliminated, and almost all the other criteria of
what constituted education in the Western world were thrown
out with the bath water when PC and diversity and a mis-
understanding of equality became the new dictators.
Gary Williams
> As to "monolingual countrymen", most foreign students don't have any. It
> is the norm, worldwide, for most people to speak several languages
> routinely.
In that case, the hypothesis that one either learns grammar or is
motivated to learn grammar by the observation that grammar works
differently in different languages rather than through the skills and
personalities of the grammar teachers in a monolingual environment has
not been tested.
> ... Everybody knows
> how to eat, too, yet there are courses in agriculture, dietetics,
> nutrition, health, cuisine, etc.
Few of which are required at the high school level.
> The art of looking and interpreting visible phenomena is more or less
> inborn; and the art of painting *can* be acquired, even to the master
> level, without any serious study of color, chemistry, physiology, design,
> or art history. Geniuses happen. For non-geniuses, though, it's very
> hard to talk about it usefully that way, and practically impossible to
> teach it effectively.
Good point in one sense. I had some little (very little) art
instruction in grades one-eight. The fact that I still can't make
much more than stick figures says something about either the quality
of that instruction, my motivation at the time, or both. But,
although my life might be richer if I had any idea how to display the
contours of a surface by the use of color to indicate light and
shadow, I have somehow managed to get by without it.
So your analogy between painting and writing may in fact be a better
one than you intended.
> Writing is much the same; it's a technology that builds on but is not the
> same as the human ability to talk and understand natural language.
Your point is well taken that if we're going to spend time teaching
grammar at all, we might as well teach real grammar as false grammar.
And my guess is that what is really taught is neither true nor false
grammar, but would more properly go under the heading of "style". I
agree that if someone is to write really well, it will help him do so
to have a set of concepts and terms that help him organize his
thinking about his writing. I guess our main disagreement is how much
of this needs to be taught to people who aren't going to be writers.
Some, no doubt, for the same reason that I had to attend classes in
geometry and
physics which have, as it developed, almost no practical use for me.
I need to know that there are such things as geometry and physics and
the kinds of problems they can solve, so that if I run into such a
problem I will know which kind of book to pull off my shelf or which
kind of expert to consult. Also, before high school graduation we
don't generally know which of us are going to be writers, and which
will be physicists, so we have to teach everyone a little of
everything.
> The fact that the study of language is interesting, let alone fun, is
> frosting on the cake, as well as the best-kept secret in America.
At last we agree. Although I might tend to think that the fact is
closer to being the cake as well than you do.
Gary Williams
Franke
Franke wrote:
> I apologize that I did not make myself more clear the first time.
Maybe I should have written "I apologize for not making myself
more clear the first time".
This is one reason I enjoy reading some of the threads in this NG.
I keep finding that I am guilty of a number of the linguistic gaffes
that I dislike in the writing of others. I tend to think of posts as a
kind of stream of consciousness mode of expression because
I do not usually do any serious rewriting, only minor proofreading
and editing. The way I speak English is very different from the way
I write it when I edit and rewrite papers for my clients.
On the one hand, it is a humbling experience, but on the other, it
is most enriching, because I learn a great deal.
John O'Flaherty
I have to say that I read that sentence without a stumble (exept that I'd
use clearer instead of more clear). I can see that 'apologize for' might
be a better choice than 'apologize that', but the latter doesn't sound
wrong to me.
Evan Kirshenbaum
> Bilingualism is an interesting issue. As I understand the word, it
> means being able to use two languages with *equal* or nearly equal
> fluency -- a tough test, in my opinion.
But one which, surprisingly, seems extremely easy to pass if you grow
up in an environment in which more than one language is spoken or hit
such an environment sufficiently early. The Lithuanian and Mandarin
speaking kids on my block are obviously just as fluent in either their
home language or English. (I don't know the Tagalog speaker well
enough to comment, and the Ukranian "speaker" hasn't started talking
yet.) Josh's Spanish-speaking friends are equally comfortable in
Spanish and English. My grandfather, who came to the US at the age
of, I believe, nine, is at least as comfortable in English as in his
native Yiddish, and my mother-in-law, who came from Austria at age
seven or so, is now more comfortable in English than in German.
Neither of them speak with any noticeable accent.
--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
HP Laboratories |Other computer companies have spent
1501 Page Mill Road, Building 1U |15 years working on fault-tolerant
Palo Alto, CA 94304 |computers. Microsoft has spent
|its time more fruitfully, working
kirsh...@hpl.hp.com |on fault-tolerant *users*.
(650)857-7572
Padraig Breathnach
>There are tests that distinguish between an adjective and a participle.
>An adjective (but not a participle) can occur with the intensifier 'very':"
>
Thank you -- a useful distinction of which I had not been consciously
aware (I could claim to relate to the examples, but had not thought
them through to the rule).
PB
J. W. Love
would attempt to demonstrate the usage of the passive or any other standard
are unaware of, the 2 verbs "to white" have nothing to do with the adjective
"white" in your post. The proper adjective to have used is "whited", whether
you meant "whittled" or "whitened", because, as you can see from the MW3rd
entries above, these two verbs have past participles that end in -ed.>>
Good Lord. The meaning of _white_ is beside the point. Let me try a different
tack, and borrow a yet more nonsensical example:
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Is it your thesis that not even the diligent little Steiger children should be
able to parse this sentence?
<<The only time I have heard or used anything close the verb "to white" is when
I have heard "Rinso Blue whitens your clothes like no other"--and Americans
have been using "to whiten" for at least the past 40-50 years. We do not, as
far as I know, use "to white" as a verb. At least I've never read or heard it
during the past half century.>>
Would it be more disturbing if one had used, say, _blithe, full,_ and _period_
as verbs?
Franke
"J. W. Love" wrote:
> Franke wrote: <<In any case, despite the remotest of possibilities that anyone
> would attempt to demonstrate the usage of the passive or any other standard
> English gammar [_sic_] point by using obscure words that most English speakers
> are unaware of, the 2 verbs "to white" have nothing to do with the adjective
> "white" in your post. The proper adjective to have used is "whited", whether
> you meant "whittled" or "whitened", because, as you can see from the MW3rd
> entries above, these two verbs have past participles that end in -ed.>>
>
> Good Lord. The meaning of _white_ is beside the point.
Okay. I have no need to argue with that. But what is the point of
using sentences with dubious or no meanings when there are
meaningful sentences that can be parsed?
> Let me try a different
> tack, and borrow a yet more nonsensical example:
>
> Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
>
> Is it your thesis that not even the diligent little Steiger children should be
> able to parse this sentence?
I don't know the Steiger children and I have never asked
an elementary or a jr high school student to parse such a
sentence, so I can make no judgment. I am familiar with
this little gem from Chomsky. It is a perfectly grammatical
but meaningless sentence. It certainly can be used to teach
lack of a necessary relationship between grammar and meaning,
if need be.
> <<The only time I have heard or used anything close the verb "to white" is when
> I have heard "Rinso Blue whitens your clothes like no other"--and Americans
> have been using "to whiten" for at least the past 40-50 years. We do not, as
> far as I know, use "to white" as a verb. At least I've never read or heard it
> during the past half century.>>
>
> Would it be more disturbing if one had used, say, _blithe, full,_ and _period_
> as verbs?
Depends upon the context. I just don't understand why one
would want to use non-verbs as verbs when trying to explain
the difference between a passive construction and a predicate
adjective construction to folks who have trouble understanding
the difference given sentences whose meanings they understand.
(Granted, Mrs Steiger was not paying attention to meanings or
parts of speech, only to the presence or absence of the BE verb,
which suggests that she needs even more instruction than her
kids do.) This just seems to me to introduce one further
confounding factor into the mind of the person who needs the
explanation. Why not just use
1 Ahab was VERB + -ING the whale.
2 The whale was VERB + -ED by Ahab.
3a The whale was PP [= VERB +-ED].
3b* The whale was very PP [= VERB +-ED].
4 The whale was (very) ADJ [looks like PP but isn't].
1, 2, and 3a are paasives but 4 is not. Then you will have
to give a meaningful example of all these abstractions, eg
the transitive verb "to tire"
tire: transitive verb
1 : to exhaust or considerably decrease the physical
strength of : FATIGUE, WEARY *the long hike tired
the younger scouts*
2 : to wear out the patience of : satiate to the point
of weariness or aversion : bore completely *the endless
chattering tired him and he left the room*
3 : to use up : wear out : OVERWORK *tiring the land
by overcultivation
MW3rd
One of my linguistics profs used the sentence "Pat splarked
Chris, and then Chris blurged Pat" to demonstrate that even
if we did not know the word in question, we could tell what
part of speech it was by looking at morphemes like "-ed" and
position of the "word" in the sentence. Well, of course. And
so what? I do have to point this out to my EFL students from
time to time; despite their 6 years of training in English
grammar, they apparently have not been taught how to
analyze a sentence for meaning--they read and listen for
"key words", so they don't even use the grammar they
are supposed to know (but really don't).
Franke
"J. W. Love" wrote:
1a Ahab was VERB + -ING the whale.
1b Ahab VERB + -ED the whale
2 The whale was VERB + -ED by Ahab.
3a The whale was PP [= VERB +-ED].
3b* The whale was very PP [= VERB +-ED].
4 The whale was (very) ADJ [looks like PP but isn't].
2 and 3a are passives but 1a, 1b, and 4 are not. Then you
Charles Riggs
Am I right in thinking that all of these are in the active voice
except for number 2?
Charles Riggs
J. W. Love
of using sentences with dubious or no meanings when there are meaningful
sentences that can be parsed?>>
Why restrict analysis to easy examples? If Keats can ask if rains haven't
"Green'd [!] over April's lap," and Tennyson can get "Black'd [!] with . . .
branding thunder," maybe somebody can say that Moby-Dick whited [!] the sea.
(See a parallel example in Auden's moon, which "queens the Heavens," quoted
below.)
<<I have never asked an elementary or a jr high school student to parse such a
sentence. . . . It is a perfectly grammatical but meaningless sentence. It
certainly can be used to teach lack of a necessary relationship between grammar
and meaning, if need be.>>
And deforming it into further nonsense might press EFL students even harder!---
*Comorless treen ibeas fleep suriously.
But fluent speakers should still be able to parse it.
<<I just don't understand why one would want to use non-verbs [like _blithe,
full,_ and _period_] as verbs when trying to explain the difference between a
passive construction and a predicate adjective construction to folks who have
trouble understanding the difference given sentences whose meanings they
understand.>>
The world often surprises us! Anyway, _blithe, full,_ and _period_ aren't
nonverbs: Auden has (re)verbed them for us (_blithe_ and _full_ have long
histories as verbs):
1. Our apparatniks will continue making / the usual squalid mess called
History: / all we can pray for is that artists, / chefs and saints may still
appear to blithe it.
2. Unsmudged, thank God, my Moon still queens the Heavens / as She ebbs and
fulls, a Presence to glop at.
3. [The moon landing was] a grand gesture. But what does it period? / What
does it osse?
The underlying verbs in example 3 are _period_ & _osse._ Assiduous little
home-schooled children will recognize that, as realized in the example, these
verbs are active & transitive. (For extra credit, they may parse _glop at._)
<<Why not just use
1a Ahab was VERB + -ING the whale.
1b Ahab VERB + -ED the whale
2 The whale was VERB + -ED by Ahab.
3a The whale was PP [= VERB +-ED].
3b* The whale was very PP [= VERB +-ED].
4 The whale was (very) ADJ [looks like PP but isn't].
2 and 3a are passives but 1a, 1b, and 4 are not. Then you will have to give a
meaningful example of all these abstractions, eg the transitive verb "to
tire">>
A point Mr. Lawler made (if I read him right) is that without having undergone
the _very_ and _by Harry_ tests, 3a hasn't proved whether it's stative or
passive. Is there also a postposed-verbal-particle test?---
5. John was fired. [=passive]
6. John was fired up. [=nonpassive?]
7. John was very fired up. [=nonpassive!]
This leads into a harder problem. If, as Mr. Lawler seems to imply, [a]
participled verbs markable with _by Harry_ are passive, and as he says, [b] "An
adjective (but not a participle) can occur with the intensifier ‘very'" (and
so its sentence isn't passive), what's happening in the following example?
8. John was very fired up by Harry.
By test [a], this sentence would seem to be passive, but by test [b], it would
seem to be nonpassive. Keeping the verb _tired,_ as in examples earlier in the
thread, poses the same problem:
9. John was very tired out by that effort.
Something seems wrong with the tests, or I've misstated them, or they need
adjusting to accommodate postposed verbal particles, or examples 8 & 9 aren't
Standard English. (Do examples 8 & 9 sound unacceptable to native
English-speakers?)
<<I do have to point this out to my EFL students from time to time; despite
their 6 years of training in English grammar, they apparently have not been
taught how to analyze a sentence for meaning--they read and listen for "key
words", so they don't even use the grammar they are supposed to know (but
really don't).>>
Hmm. "Key words"? the ones with "meaning"? the big, full ones (rather than the
little, empty ones, like _that_ & _but_)? Then set them the sentence
I saw that all my second wife's paternal grandmother's first cousins but
Ezekiel went swimming.
and ask who went swimming. If they say Ezekiel did, they're in trouble!
John Lawler
[snip]
> 5. John was fired. [=passive]
> 6. John was fired up. [=nonpassive?]
> 7. John was very fired up. [=nonpassive!]
>This leads into a harder problem. If, as Mr. Lawler seems to imply, [a]
>participled verbs markable with _by Harry_ are passive, and as he says,
>[b] "An adjective (but not a participle) can occur with the intensifier
>'very'" (and so its sentence isn't passive), what's happening in the
>following example?
> 8. John was very fired up by Harry.
>By test [a], this sentence would seem to be passive, but by test [b], it
>would seem to be nonpassive. Keeping the verb _tired,_ as in examples
>earlier in the thread, poses the same problem:
> 9. John was very tired out by that effort.
>Something seems wrong with the tests, or I've misstated them, or they
>need adjusting to accommodate postposed verbal particles, or examples 8 &
>9 aren't Standard English. (Do examples 8 & 9 sound unacceptable to
>native English-speakers?)
There, you've said it. The "postposed verbal particles" are in fact part
of the phrasal verbs 'fire up' and 'tire out', which are the source of the
phrasal adjectives 'fired up' and 'tired out'. No different, in
principle, from the participle 'closed' being the source of the adjective
'closed'.
In (7)-(9), John is reported to be in a particular state (either mental
or physical); this is an prototype adjectival function. A passive does
not usually report a state, but rather an event: the same event that would
be reported by the corresponding active sentence.
Note that in almost every case where an adjective has the same shape as a
participle, it refers to a state that comes about as a result of some
event. This is the underlying semantics of such idioms as using perfect
'have got' (i.e, 'have come to receive') as a synonym for present 'have'
(i.e, 'possess') -- if you have received something, then you possess it
now. We can tire someone out, and then they'll be in the state we call
'tired out'; we can fire someone up (metaphorically, one hopes), and then
they'll be in the state we call 'fired up'.
As for the 'by' phrase in (9), note that 'from' could be used just as
easily, which is not the case with passive-derived agent by-phrases.
> 9. John was very tired out by that effort.
9a John was very tired out from that effort.
10. John was hit by the car.
10a *John was hit from the car. (=10)
Not all the uses of 'by' denote passive. Passive is a construction, with
multiple characteristics, some optional. No one criterion defines it, to
the exclusion of all others, which is rather the point of this thread, if
there is one -- definitions are the wrong way to go about syntax.
-John Lawler http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler Michigan Linguistics Dept
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Because in our brief lives, we catch so little of the vastness of
history, we tend too much to think of language as being solid as a
dictionary, with granite-like permanence, rather than as the rampant
restless sea of metaphor that it is." -- Julian Jaynes
Wayne Brown
> But one which, surprisingly, seems extremely easy to pass if you grow
> up in an environment in which more than one language is spoken or hit
> such an environment sufficiently early. The Lithuanian and Mandarin
> speaking kids on my block are obviously just as fluent in either their
> home language or English. (I don't know the Tagalog speaker well
> enough to comment, and the Ukranian "speaker" hasn't started talking
> yet.) Josh's Spanish-speaking friends are equally comfortable in
> Spanish and English. My grandfather, who came to the US at the age
> of, I believe, nine, is at least as comfortable in English as in his
> native Yiddish, and my mother-in-law, who came from Austria at age
> seven or so, is now more comfortable in English than in German.
> Neither of them speak with any noticeable accent.
That, I believe, is a somewhat of a mixed bag, if the criterion of *equal or
nearly equal fluency* is applied. Your mother-in-law, for example. She has
practically her entire school education in English, with her German probably
on the level of the seven-year-old she was when she left Austria. That makes
a whale of difference toward influencing bilingualism. The examples are hard
to judge because much depends on the role of the other language at home.
Consider the case of Henry Kissinger, the former US foreign secretary. He
has often been a guest in Germany and has occasionally spoken German on
German TV. When he does, he invariably excuses himself at the outset for his
German, saying he left Germany when he was 14 and joking that his interests
in those days did not center on language but on playing soccer. He speaks
German even with the strong local accent of the town where he was born. But
when he talks about philosophical or political issues, which are obviously
difficult for him to handle in German, he speaks English and an interpreter
translates his remarks into German. He once gave a long speech in German
when he received an award in Germany, reading from a prepared text. There
was no doubt that he had bitten off more than he could chew because he read
the text laboriously and stumbled on words he obviously was not familiar
with.
Yet Mr. Kissinger came from an educated German family; his father was a high
school teacher in Germany, a job held by highly educated people. Mr.
Kissinger certainly speaks German and English, but I doubt he would call
himself bilingual if the definition included *equal or nearly equal
fluency.*
Regards,-----WB.
Gary Williams
>
> Consider the case of Henry Kissinger, ...
I was told an even sadder story, one of a boy from rural Spain who
went with his family to Germany for a number of years. He was
sensitive to the fact--as young people not infrequently are--that his
family was not at all educated nor sophisticated. He thus chose as
his model for speaking his native language not them, but the Spanish
teacher in the German school. Eventually his parents returned, but to
urban, not rural, Spain. So the poor kid now speaks in a hick accent
overlaid with a German accent, and with grammatical and lexical errors
drawn from each source. He has a pretty tough time making himself
understood, and an even tougher time not being thought rather amusing.
Gary Williams
Wayne Brown
news:9af8cc96.01062...@posting.google.com...
>
> I was told an even sadder story, one of a boy from rural Spain who
> went with his family to Germany for a number of years. He was
> sensitive to the fact--as young people not infrequently are--that his
> family was not at all educated nor sophisticated. He thus chose as
> his model for speaking his native language not them, but the Spanish
> teacher in the German school. Eventually his parents returned, but to
> urban, not rural, Spain. So the poor kid now speaks in a hick accent
> overlaid with a German accent, and with grammatical and lexical errors
> drawn from each source. He has a pretty tough time making himself
> understood, and an even tougher time not being thought rather amusing.
>
> Gary Williams
Unusual. But one thing is not clear in the story. Why did the Spanish
teacher speak with a hick accent, which the young man learned?
Regards,-----WB.
Gary Williams
> ... Why did the Spanish
> teacher speak with a hick accent, which the young man learned?
He got the hick part from his parents; the German part from the instructor.
Gary Williams
Jerry Friedman
> John Lawler wrote:
...
> > As to "monolingual countrymen", most foreign students don't have any. It
> > is the norm, worldwide, for most people to speak several languages
> > routinely. The equation of "one country = one language" is a modern
> > monstrosity, which Americans in particular have bought into so thoroughly
> > that we don't even know how monstrous it is.
>
> I've read that most Indians who live in Hindi-speaking areas, speak only
> Hindi. I wonder if they can discuss the grammar of their own language.
> While I agree with your assessment of the American ignorance of English
> grammar and aversion for foreign languages, I think you probably
> overstating your case about the linguistic virtues of foreigners.
I agree. Monolingualism is certainly the norm in Mexico, according to
what
I've seen and according to my Mexican student/teacher. In my very
limited
experience of Costa Rica, the only people who spoke English were those
in San Jose who came into contact with tourists in their jobs. (Yes,
I know there
are small English-speaking populations in Costa Rica.)
Multilingualism may
be far more common in most of the world than it is among non-immigrant
populations in the U.S., but is it really "the norm"?
...
--
Jerry Friedman
P. Schultz
>
> "Richard Fontana" <rf...@sparky.cs.nyu.edu> wrote in message
> news:Pine.GSO.4.21.010621...@sparky.cs.nyu.edu...
> > On Fri, 22 Jun 2001, Peter B. Steiger wrote:
> >
> > > As homeschoolers, my wife and I often disagree over points minor
> > > and major in our childrens' education.
>
> [snip]
>
> > I'm all for home schooling, but I am concerned that in this particular
> area
> > your child is getting a deficient education. Either understand what
> you're
> > talking about or don't teach it at all.
>
> Here we see the dangers of home schooling. On the other side of the coin,
> though, are "real" schools doing their job competently? No. <...>
Right. This has NOTHING to do with home schooling. It has to do with
ignorance, which is thriving in the public schools of the U.S. My son
was told by his 7th grade English teacher that "to run" is a
prepositional phrase.
\\P. Schultz
P. Schultz
> <...>
> I imagine Peter's wife is remembering general advice on making writing
> strong and direct by avoiding the passive (whenever possible) and also
> related forms that are not technically called "the passive" but are very
> much like it and lead to the same bad qualities. <...>
The point is, there are many "authoritative" people who know that "the
passive voice" is bad, but they don't really know what the passuve voice
is.
The following is from a real, genuine, internal US government memo that
I saw myself. It was not intended to be humorous or ironic. (Believe me.
I knew the author. He was incapable of such):
"All memoranda generated by this office are to be written in clear,
active voice English."
\\P. Schultz
P. Schultz
> All passive voice constructions include the "copula" (or "be"
> verb) + participle. <...>
No they don't. My brother got caught by the cops.
\\P. Schultz
Franke
"P. Schultz" wrote:
"got" is an informal substitute for "was" and is not acceptable in
formal English. But you are correct--for what it's worth.
> \\P. Schultz
Robert Lipton
Not quite..... 'to get' is more active than 'to be'... not much, but
slightly. Your brother fouled up and got caught. If he hadn't, he'd
never have been caught.
Bob
Franke
Robert Lipton wrote:
"Your brother fouled up and was caught"--I can't see how this is any
less active than "got caught" as it is not a statal passive. According to
Quirk et al., the passive aux. get "tends to be limited to constructions
without an expressed animate agent" (expect in the case of got caught
by the police, eg) and eliminates the ambiguity of the statal passive
in sentences like "The chair {was/got} broken". We know in the
second structure that the sentence means to express that something
or someone broke the chair and not merely to describe the chair's
state of being. So, yes, it provides a more dynamic verb for a
relatively few English sentences.
Robert Lipton
Franke wrote:
>
> Robert Lipton wrote:
>
> > Franke wrote:
> > >
> > > "P. Schultz" wrote:
> > >
> > > > Franke wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > All passive voice constructions include the "copula" (or "be"
> > > > > verb) + participle. <...>
> > > >
> > > > No they don't. My brother got caught by the cops.
> > >
> > > "got" is an informal substitute for "was" and is not acceptable in
> > > formal English. But you are correct--for what it's worth.
> >
> > Not quite..... 'to get' is more active than 'to be'... not much, but
> > slightly. Your brother fouled up and got caught.
>
> "Your brother fouled up and was caught"--I can't see how this is any
> less active than "got caught" as it is not a statal passive. According to
>
A private note. I'm opt trying to justify it.... it just feels less....
involved in the process. I hear a lot of distinctions in constructions
that most people seem to miss. Perhaps these are general, dialectical,
idiolectical or delusional..... all I can say is that "to be xed"
sounds absolutely passive to me, and "to get xed" sounds a bit more
active, or perhaps, involved.
Bob
Thomas Fiscoe
> On Fri, 22 Jun 2001, Peter B. Steiger wrote:
>
> > As homeschoolers, my wife and I often disagree over points minor
> > few exceptions, like Beach Boys Appreciation 101 and Computer
> > Programming For Total Geeks), but as principal I like to think I have
> > some authority in this house. Hey, a guy can dream, can't he?
> >
> > Anyway, today's debate came up when she tried to explain to
> > 9.35-year-old why passive voice is a Bad Thing in writing. She
> > started citing examples of his crime from the notes he took on
> > a book he is reading, and I noticed that many of her examples
> > were simple descriptive statements: "Marco Polo was tired
> > after his voyage", "The capital city was magnificent", etc.
>
> That's not the passive voice. Those are sentences with "to be" in the
> past tense.
>
> > I jumped in at this point with my usual authoritative voice,
> > stating that the dreaded passive construct only applies when
> > the subject is the recipient of an action, and she laughed at
> > me in the way that only Mensans can laugh at their non-Mensan
> > husbands who utter nonsensical statements like "But honey,
> > how can you afford that new sewing machine if we don't have
> > any money in the bank?"
> >
> > I say, the construct (subject-linking verb-predicate) is NOT
> > passive; it does not receive any action. "To be" may not
> > be a real high-octane action like "To explode" or "To annihilate",
> > but dang it, it's a perfectly honest verb that never did anything
> > to hurt anybody.
> >
> > She says that any sentence which contains any form of "to be"
> > is Evil Incarnate and represents passive voice in its vilest form.
> >
> > I realize that by posting this question in the mother of all
> > grammatical flamewars I'm inviting disaster, but what I'd really
> > like is a pointer to some authoritative reference I can rub her
> > nose in. I mean, in which I can rub her nose. Actually I'd
> > be delighted (albeit disappointed) if the reference proves
> > me wrong; I just want some kind of official answer so we
> > can go back to arguing about why the sea is boiling hot
> > and whether pigs have wings.
> >
> > OK, your responses are eagerly awaited {chortle}.
>
> This should be intelligently explained in any reasonable
> junior-high-school-level textbook on English grammar. I'm all for home
> schooling, but I am concerned that in this particular area your child is
> getting a deficient education. Either understand what you're talking
> about or don't teach it at all.
I will now proceed to walk on your turf and repost all the text(like
you did) and say something stupid(like you did). Are you implying
that the school system that we have today is any good? Passive voice
is a form of writing that is HARDLY even necessary in standard
everyday writing. Moreso, unless you are going to be an author it is
not too critical. I doubt most people even know what it is. Don't be
an asshole, it's worse than not knowing what passive voice is.
Yours Truly, Thomas Fiscoe
Skitt
"Thomas Fiscoe" <de...@twcny.rr.com> wrote in message
news:1c07a4f4.01062...@posting.google.com...
> Passive voice
> is a form of writing that is HARDLY even necessary in standard
> everyday writing. Moreso, unless you are going to be an author it is
> not too critical. I doubt most people even know what it is.
What's a "moreso"?
--
Skitt (in SF Bay Area) http://i.am/skitt/
I speak English well -- I learn it from a book!
-- Manuel of "Fawlty Towers" (he's from Barcelona).
Franke
Robert Lipton wrote:
As John Lawler, Quirk et al., and Lanham, all of whom I've quoted recently in
this thread, pointed out, if the ppart can take "very", then it is a predicate
adjective and not a passive at all. "was caught" is not ambiguous as it cannot
take "very" (*very caught). But "got caught" is more dynamic and unambiguously
a dynamic passive construction that implies an agent, so you are correct when
you says that ' "to get xed" *sounds* a bit more active, or perhaps,
involved'. OTOH, it is an informal usage and would in almost every case be
replaced by "was Xed" in a dissertation or other formal writing.
>
>
> Bob
Richard Fontana
What was wrong with that? Serious question. I'm concerned that I'm not
trimming as much material lately as I should be, a consequence of my
switching to Xnews on the recommendation of AUE's Joe Manfre.
> and say something stupid(like you did). Are you implying
> that the school system that we have today is any good?
No. What gave you that impression? I actually said "I'm all for home
schooling". "To be all for" something means to support something. I don't
really think you can generalize about the US educational system; it's too
decentralized. In many prosperous communities the public schools are
surprisingly good. In many impoverished urban communities the public
schools are predictably bad. There are also all sorts of forms of private
education, though most Americans use the public schools.
> Passive voice
> is a form of writing that is HARDLY even necessary in standard
> everyday writing.
I disagree with that. It can be overused by poor or clumsy writers, but I
think in general it is indispensable. I think the idea that the passive
voice is evil is one of those things that people just believe because
someone told them that it was so.
> Moreso, unless you are going to be an author it is
> not too critical.
"Moreso" -- is that Spanish? I took Latin in high school and French in
college.
Robert Lieblich
>
> "Thomas Fiscoe" <de...@twcny.rr.com> wrote in message
> news:1c07a4f4.01062...@posting.google.com...
>
> > Passive voice
> > is a form of writing that is HARDLY even necessary in standard
> > everyday writing. Moreso, unless you are going to be an author it is
> > not too critical. I doubt most people even know what it is.
>
> What's a "moreso"?
A small ediboo.
Gene Wirchenko
>Richard Fontana wrote:
[snip]
>>Here's an algorithm, though it isn't a definition. [...]
^^^^^^^^^
>Frankly, I think it's a long shot that "Algorithm your terms" will ever catch
>on.
He used it as a noun, so what is your point?
Sincerely,
Gene Wirchenko
Computerese Irregular Verb Conjugation:
I have preferences.
You have biases.
He/She has prejudices.