The passage Bob Yates quoted seemed weird to me in that it didn't show
any examples. How can you explain or define something without giving examples?

Maybe the best way to teach people to recognize passives is to show them
active/passive pairs so they can see the focus shift, and the shift from
'who does what to whom' to 'who gets what done to them'. It's also fun
to point out how the passive is used when the agent is either unknown or
is deliberately hidden, the most famous example probably being 'mistakes
were made'. There was a Berkeley thesis a long time ago that used the
Watergate transcripts as data -- loaded with agentless passives!!

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Johanna Rubba   Assistant Professor, Linguistics
English Department, California Polytechnic State University
One Grand Avenue  • San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
Tel. (805)-756-2184  •  Fax: (805)-756-6374 • Dept. Phone.  756-259
• E-mail: [log in to unmask] •  Home page: http://www.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
                                       **
"Understanding is a lot like sex; it's got a practical purpose,
but that's not why people do it normally"  -            Frank  Oppenheimer
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