Sentence examples for passive clauses from inspiring English sources

And he's right that passive clauses can be semantically vivid, while active clauses can be woolly and vague.

"The moron who screwed this up is going to be fired so fast there'll be nothing but two smoking shoes left on the floor under his desk" is pretty semantically active, but it contains not one but two passive clauses.

In other words, passive clauses look much more like their active counterparts in underlying structure.

Larson proposes that both of these points about passive clauses have analogs in the structure of double-object VPs.

For example, it is often claimed that passive clauses have very much the same kinds of underlying structures as the synonymous active clauses, and thus a passive clause like (Aii) would have an underlying structure much like (T1).

Objective Case is assumed to be assigned to any NP in direct object position, e.g., my pass in (T1), and Nominative Case is assigned to an NP in the subject position of a tensed clause, e.g., the guard in (T1).) He also makes two specific assumptions about the derivation of passive clauses.

Unlike typical Clients in English, this participant cannot be made the Subject of a passive clause.

Otros cannot be made Subject of a passive clause: Otros fueron dados muerte* (Others were given death*).

Secondly, los campesinos (the peasants) can be made Subject of a passive clause: Los campesinos fueron asesinados (por los subversivos) (The peasants were murdered (by the subversives)).

During that time, he decided that traditional grammatical constructions, such as the passive, or relative clauses, which he had spent the previous twenty years analyzing, were just conventional artifacts, and that the truly interesting properties of syntax cut across those boundaries.

Numerous neuropsychological studies show that left hemisphere patients have particular problems with aspects of sentential processing involving complex syntactic structures such as passive constructions, embedded clauses, or long-distance dependencies [Caramazza and Zurif, 1976; Caplan et al., 1996].