Brett,
I have been teaching ESL for a long time and have thought about "errors" that are considered passive voice errors in some of the error literature. I think such a label is misleading.
Both have to do with the kinds of verbs Herb mentions.
First are the reverse psychological verbs. In other words, the experiencier is in the object position. Amuse is such a verb.
Consider amuse vs. enjoy.
1) The clown amused the children.
2) The children enjoyed the clown.
Children experiences the emotion in both verbs but is not in the same grammatical position.
There is all kinds of evidence that L2 learners assume that all verbs are like enjoy.
So, a possible L2 error for amuse is
3) The children are amusing the clown.
If I'm right, (3) from a proficient speaker point of view, appears to be a problem of passive morphology. Clearly amusing should be the past participle amused and you need to add by. However, if an L2 learner assumes amuse is like enjoy, then the learner was not attempting a passive construction.
Last week I had a Japanese student tell me the following:
4) I am confusing by what I am supposed to do for the first paper.
Note: confuse is like amuse and not enjoy.
****
There are a set of verbs that move the object to subject position without passive morphology. Although I haven't seen receive having this problem, but consider increase or decrease.
5) The rising price of oil is increasing the price of gas.
Although you can make (5) passive
6) The price of gas has been increased by the rising price of oil.
It is not necessary.
7) The price of gas increases every day.
Because L2 learners don't realize such verbs like increase exist, I have seen the following:
8) The price of gas is increased every day.
Note that a lot of cooking verbs (bake, fry, boil, etc) and other verbs like start, open close allows the underlying object to subject position without passive morphology.
If a learner writes (8), is it a passive error from the learner's perspective?
Look at the Gooficon, a very early L2 taxonomy for L2 errors for how these types of "errors" are labelled.
Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri
>>> "STAHLKE, HERBERT F" <[log in to unmask]> 01/21/10 7:52 PM >>>
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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