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Guy Courchesne
Joined: 10 Mar 2003
Posts: 9650
Location: Mexico City
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 Posted: Sat Apr 22, 2006 2:39 am Post subject: |
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-was born-...no end of trouble with that one for students. For those of you that like to play the passive off the active, would you compare it to 'My mother bore me in 1973?' 'She bears children regularly'  |
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M@tt
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Posts: 473
Location: here and there
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| Posted: Sat Apr 22, 2006 5:53 am Post subject: |
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be located is passive.  |
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Ben Round de Bloc
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Posts: 1946
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| Posted: Sat Apr 22, 2006 3:09 pm Post subject: |
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| M@tt wrote: |
| be located is passive. |
I don't know. I know it can be done in some languages, but is it possible in English to have true passive voice with intransitive verbs?
I can see "be located" as passive when located is used as a transitive verb, meaning "be found." I lost my book, but it was located later. Active: Somebody located/found it.
However, it seems to me to be stretching it a bit, even with an unnamed cause/agent, to say that I am located in Merida (meaning "be settled or situated") is in passive voice. Active: Somebody locates/settles/situates me in Merida?
If I take sentences similar to I am located in Merida, such as I am starved or I am tired or I am relieved, are those also in passive voice? Somebody (an unnamed agent) starves, tires, or relieves me? I would tend to call located, starved, tired, and relieved participles used as predicate adjectives after the verb be. |
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MELEE
Joined: 22 Jan 2003
Posts: 2583
Location: The Mexican Hinterland
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| Posted: Sat Apr 22, 2006 4:12 pm Post subject: |
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| grahamcito wrote: |
So when do you's all teach the passive? At my school, we save it for after the tenses, and teach common usages (like 'I was born...') as functional phrases.
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Our students first contact with "real English" will be reading texts in their feilds of study. Later, we hope that they will want to listen to English, and speak and write in English. But the reality we face is that they have to read pretty complex English very early on in their studies. So we teach the passive before they have seen all the tenses. I kind of see three stages of development.
1) understand the passive when they come across it in a text.
2) be able to form the passive accurately and transform between passive and active.
3) choose to use (or not to use) the passive accurately in writting and speaking.
We teach them the first in their second semester of university.
The second stage is developed in their fifth and sixth semesters.
Deligent students hopefully begin to master the third level before graduation, but the bulk of our students to not continue English beyond the PET (Common European Framework Level B1) level.  |
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