Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The English passive voice typically involves forms of the verbs to be or to get followed by a passive participle as the subject complement—sometimes referred to as a passive verb. [ 1 ] English allows a number of additional passive constructions that are not possible in many other languages with analogous passive formations to the above.
In English, the similarity between the active past tense form of verbs (i.e., "John kicked the ball") and the passive past tense (i.e., "the ball was kicked") can give rise to confusion concerning a special form of reduced relative clause, called the reduced object relative passive clause [5] (so called because the noun being modified is the ...
In the canonical form of the passive, a form of the auxiliary verb be (or sometimes get) is used, together with the past participle of the lexical verb. Passive voice can be expressed in combination together with tenses, aspects and moods, by means of appropriate marking of the auxiliary (which for this purpose is not a stative verb, i.e. it ...
The canonical passive in European languages has the following properties: The subject is not an agent. There is a change in: word order; or in nominal morphology—the form of the nouns in the sentence. There is specific verbal morphology—a particular form of the verb indicates passive voice. The problem arises with non-European languages.
Verbs such as λέγω require either ὡς or ὅτι as an introductory particle. If the introductory verb is in a secondary tense, the finite verb of the ὡς / ὅτι clause is usually changed from the indicative mood into the corresponding tense in the optative mood, but the indicative verb is sometimes retained for vividness.
The dative construction is a grammatical way of constructing a sentence, using the dative case.A sentence is also said to be in dative construction if the subject and the object (direct or indirect) can switch their places for a given verb, without altering the verb's structure (subject becoming the new object, and the object becoming the new subject).
The first English grammar, Bref Grammar for English by William Bullokar, published in 1586, does not use the term "auxiliary" but says: All other verbs are called verbs-neuters-un-perfect because they require the infinitive mood of another verb to express their signification of meaning perfectly: and be these, may, can, might or mought, could, would, should, must, ought, and sometimes, will ...
Here the subject may invert with certain main verbs, e.g. After the pleasure comes the pain, or with a chain of verbs, e.g. In the box will be a bottle. These are described in the article on the subject–verb inversion in English. Further, inversion was not limited to auxiliaries in older forms of English.