THE PASSIVE VOICE

1. Introduction: passives are very abundant in English and occur

more frequently than in Spanish in all kinds of contexts for several
reasons:
1. impersonality: the speaker does not want to show his implication in
the sentence:
ex: Tons of rubbish are thrown out to the sea every year.
2. focus: we want to put some emphasis on a certain part of the
sentence.
Ex: The entire crop was damaged by the strong winds.
2. The passive transform
Basically, we will focus our work in what we we call PASSIVE
TRANSFORM, that is, how we come from an active sentence to a
passive sentence.
He

In other words, a Direct Object becomes the Subject of the new

passive sentence and the passive auxiliaries take the tense, person
and number of the active verb, then the past participle of the active
verb is added : let's go gradually:
Verb tense in active

Passive auxiliary:be-get

Past participle

Simple present

Breakfast Is / Gets

Cooked

Breakfast Was were

Cooked

He cooks breakfast
Simple Past

He cooked breakfast
Simple future

Breakfast will be

Cooked

Breakfast is being

Cooked

The streets were being

Cleaned

Cigarrettes have been

Forbidden

All the coast had been

Damaged

Doors have to be

Closed

He will cook breakfast

Present Continous
She is cooking
Past continous
They were cleaning the
streets
Present perfect
They have forbidden
cigarrettes
Past Perfect
The fuel had damaged all
the coast
'Have to'
You have to close doors
Need
You don't need to finish
your chores
Must, will, should, can
(modals)

Your chores don't need to Finished

be

Seatbelts must be/can

be/would be/should be

Fastened

Passengers must fasten

their seatbelts
Note that it is also possible to have a perfect infinitive after such verbs as CAN
or HAVE for a past reference:
Ex: The wind must have destroyed all those building
All those buildings must have been destroyed by the wind
'going to'
The Town Hall is going to
repair the pipelines.

The pipelines are going

to be

3. Different kinds of passive.

1. standard passive.

repaired

Any of the above sentences could serve as an example.

Ex. Seatbelts must be fastened
2. double passive: occurs whenever a verb has two objects DIRECT
and INDIRECT. Passive transform takes place in two different ways.
2.1 direct object becomes the new subject:

Note that if we have an object personal pronoun, it will become subject

pronoun and change in form(him------ --he) T O P

3 personal passive or passive with verbs of saying and believing,

such as
Agree

believe

Consider

expect

Feel

find

Hope

know

Say

suppose

Think

understand

Examples:
Elephants are known to have good memory.
Mary is said to have a new boyfriend
Life is believed to have started in the sea.
You are supposed to arrive on time (=conveys an obligation meaning)
As we see in the example, The new passive is formed with a verb
of saying or believing in the passive form followed by the 'toinfinitive' of the verb.
4. causative
The causative is similar to passive. It uses auxiliaries, but we focus on
the fact that someone does something for you.
Ex: I'm having my car serviced at the moment has a typical causative
structure .
SUBJECT + HAVE/GET something DONE
No need to say that HAVE/GET CAN take any tense whatsoever:

Different shades of meaning are possible:

1. experience:
You've had that explained often
2. allow
I won't have the piano played by anybody.
3. result of past action
Other combinations of GET + PARTICIPLE.

GET somebody/something TO DO something means 'persuade' or

'manage to'
Ex: I got the children to sit and read the lesson.