That’s what I teach my prospective teachers.  I call it the illegitimate child of the helping verb family because it is stigmatized.  To me, it doesn’t seem acceptable for formal writing, but it is so prevalent, I think it’s hopeless to rail against it.

 

Janet

 

 

List, My previous message on this topic delivered itself before I had finished it.  Here is the complete message.   Recently, a student wrote "he got run over."  This seems to be a common way of expressing the passive.   Would you characterize this as a passive?  Would you analyze "run" as the verb of the sentence and "got" as a modal operating like "was" in a normally constructed (was run over) passive?  Scott Woods

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