Brett Conway wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I got into a wee bit of a discussion with an esl class about a passive 
> construction and wonder whether anyone can help.
> 
> The sentence:
> 
> The receptionist told the guests about the hotel facilities.
> 
> Which passive construction is correct?
> 
> The guests were told about the hotel facilities by the receptionist.
> 
> or.
> 
> The hotel facilities were told about to the guests by the receptionist.

Brett,

Depending on their native language, the passive can cause peculiar 
difficulties to ESL/EFL learners. Arabs, for instance, are mystified by 
a passive followed by the subject, since the whole point of a passive in 
  Arabic is to avoid mentioning the subject. To them, passive plus 
subject is a nonsense - and when you deal with "nonsense", the mind 
naturally refuses to understand it.

Most EFL course books that I have seen do deal with the passive 
explicitly, and it teaching it appears to have become somewhat of a 
tradition in ESL.

Dave Willis deals with it in a rather different way in his book, The 
Lexical Syllabus. Willis was associated with the COBUILD project you can 
find his book is on-line at

http://www.cels.bham.ac.uk/resources/LexSyll.htm

You'll find this dealt with in Chapter 2, Words and Structures. These 
are PDF files. Here Willis points out that almost all passives can be 
parsed as adjective complements [perhaps this is Ed Vavra's "Predicate 
Adjective" complement]. Willis claims that this type of explanation can 
make quite a lot more sense to students than the traditionally 
convoluted "passive voice".

With respect to your examples above, to change an active construction to 
a passive we normally need to add only one new element: the verb "to be" 
in any of its forms. In addition to this, we will need to replace the 
active verb with its past participle. If we also intend to mention the 
subject, we will need the preposition "by" to introduce it.

If the task here is to transform "The receptionist told the guests about 
the hotel facilities" into the passive voice, I would reject the second 
attempt, "The hotel facilities were told about to the guests by the 
receptionist" on the basis of a rogue preposition "to" immediately 
before "the guests". I don't need "to". I only need "to be", the past 
participle of "tell", and maybe "by" if I still want to mention "the 
receptionist".

The "rule" I tell students attempting these transformation is, "to be", 
plus past participle, plus "by" before the subject if the subject is 
included.

I would not attempt to explain why "The hotel facilities were told about 
to the guests by the receptionist" is "wrong", and would avoid saying it 
was "wrong" in the first place. Such a discussion would only confuse 
students, and probably me,  more.

Or have a look at Willis and try to explain it in some other way.

Omar

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