Over the years we've talked about passive a number of times, and one of the issues is the question of what constitutes a passive.  The obvious syntactic description is a BE auxiliary with a past participle and optionally a by-phrase containing the agent.  But does the passive require an expressed or assumed agent?  In 

The clown amused the children.

there are two ways promoting "the children" to subject:

The children were amused by the clown.
The children were amused at the clown.

In the by-phrase, "the clown" is clearly agent, but not in the at-phrase.  So is the first sentence a passive, but the second is not.  The sentence

The city council gave an award to the most successful community organizer.

can have the recipient (dative) promoted to subject as either

The most successful community organizer was given an award by the city council.

or

The most successful community organizer received an award from the city council.

The semantic roles of the noun phrases in the two sentences are the same even though one is syntactically passive and the other active.

These are typical cases of sentences that get called passive but that don't have strict passive syntax.  What I have found in my classes is that students don't know the syntactic description but rather react that a sentence is passive if the subject is not clearly agent or if there is a BE verb.

The reason for laying this out above is that I'm curious what sorts of examples you will get.  What do teachers regard as passive errors and why?  You might even end up with an interesting paper out of this.

I hope you will post the list of examples you receive.

Herb
 
Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN  47306
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________________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Brett Reynolds [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: January 21, 2010 8:31 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Passive errors

Hi, all

I'm planning a lesson for my TESL students and I'm looking for some authentic learner errors with passive voice. I'd especially like examples of overuse of the long passive (i.e., with a 'by'-phrase), but any errors would be welcome. Please, note: I do NOT want contrived examples, but if you would share some learner-produced examples, I'd be very much in your debt.

Best,
Brett

-----------------------
Brett Reynolds
English Language Centre
Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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