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The more time I spend figuring out what a sound education is, the more appalled I am.
Thus it gave me great pleasure to discover, tonight, that other people, including other people who write for The Economist, don't know what the passive voice is.*
And that I, apparently, do.
For instance, I have no difficulty identifying the first two clauses as passive and the third as active:
- Prisoners were forced
- A prisoner was shot
- MI has instructed us to
I'm feeling better.
With that, I think I'll go learn some more algebra.
I'm on Lesson 69, Saxon Algebra 2.
update: department of corrections
Passive VOICE
Not passive TENSE
informal assessment: I can distinguish passive from active but I cannot read a Language Log post.
* gross exaggeration alert: this writer knows what passive tense is. but he's calling it passive voice. that's bad.
14 comments:
Isn't it passive voice?
My third grader is working on present, past and future progressive tense at KUMON. Its been difficult. I told him that even adults have a hard time with this.
PaulaV
I am all confused by this post. Surely, there must be a point I am not getting.
It's passive VOICE.
To add another category to tense and voice, there is also MOOD, as in indicative and subjunctive mood.
No, No! There is no such thing as "passive tense". "Tense" has to do with time. "Passive" has to do with agency.
Geoff Pullum is God. Well, not quite, but close.
i'm so confused
so....do we know whether there's such a thing as active and passive whatever??
oy
I misread what Language Log said.
The funny thing is: I kept thinking, "Don't I usually call it passive voice'?"
Passive voice is loved by me.
And perfect isn't tense, it's aspect. Tense (roughly) deals with time; aspect deals with the shape or nature of the action. We have perfect aspect and progressive aspect (and yes, also mood), but only two tenses, like all other Germanic languages: past and non-past. To make matters more complex, also like the other Germanic languages, we use a highly complex set of modals (may, might, etc.) to mark modality, which is different from mood.
Then we have the anti-passive, ergative, and un-ergative verbs ...
But, they call it perfect and imperfect "tense," thus confusing some of us.
Perfect, I thought, meant completed, finished (He walked to the store). Imperfect is ongoing, but sometime in the past, no? (He was walking to the store.) Although they are both past tenses.
I think.
Something like that.
I await the professor's response.
"ergative"
Fancy.
I'll throw in vocative for good measure.
Yes, they call perfectivity tense, but it's not (and time and tense are really two separate things, time being semantic and tense being structural), but it isn't. An act can be completed in any time, so we have "He had finished" v. "He has finished" v. "He will have finished," where you can see tense and aspect coexisting independent from each other. "Imperfect" existed in Latin, but doesn't exist in English (it's one of those non-existent grammatical constructions we got by trying to impose Latin grammar on a Germanic language). "He was going" is past tense, progressive aspect (which usually indicates ongoing action).
Ergative verbs are verbs that can either be transitive or intransitive, but when intransitive, the subject takes the role that would have been taken by the direct object had the verb been transitive, for example:
"The torpedo sank the ship."
"The ship sank."
v.
"John watched the television."
"John watched."
I would like to know grammar.
Also history.
And math.
The one good thing about having your child in a public school is that you have to learn quite a bit of this stuff in order to teach it yourself because the school isn't doing it.
Which reminds me: I'm trying to find a decent book on poetry analysis today.
sigh
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