(John met Mary at the station.) His demands were met.Below is a list of the Time place and demonstrative pronouns in Japanese placed in a table. *John was met by Mary purely by chance in the street. Mary met John purely by chance in the street. (A numberĬalled INR measures the level of anticoagulant in the blood.) Is measured by a number called the INR, is hard to control. The level of anticoagulant in the blood, which *Just 7 feet across is/are measured by the patio. when they refer to a process (set 1) and/or when they Of their senses, when the subject of the active is agentive or partlyĪgentive, i.e. (set 1) Marry, meet (setĢ) As the examples below show, these verbs permit passivization in one These verbs can be divided into two sets: Resemble, have, mean, mind,įit, cost, weigh, measure, lack, hold, etc. I don’t think they mind your criticism.This resort boasts the best beaches on the east coast.possess / lack number / hold mean mind boast befall fail (letĭown) cost / weigh marry / meet agree with: Resemble / look like / take after someone suit / fit / become have (tells location of the book) In the morning, I have to go to school.
(tells which girl) Prepositional Phrase Functioning as Adverb. (tells which book) I want to meet the girl in the green sweater. The book on the counter belongs to my mother. Time transitive verbs used statively or stative verbs, do not occur in Prepositional Phrase Functioning as Adjective. Verbs (he is running), which having no object cannot take the passive,Ī closed category of verbs or verbal phrases, which are most of the They add that in addition to copula (he is at home) and intransitive Instance, underline that transitive verb sentences can be eitherĪctive or passive, that ‘Most verbs taking just one object permit Common Prepositions Here is a list of prepositions that are most common. 159-171), and Huddleston & Pullum (2002, p. By definition, a preposition is a word used before a noun or pronoun to mark its relation to the rest of the sentence, such as 'to' in 'I went to the beach.' 1. Object complement, then the utterance can be passivized. The passive is traditionally described as being based on the She writes: (slightly modified, & augmented) Monique De Mattia-Viviès argues that 'passivization can be better accounted for when the phenomenon of transitivity, on which it is based, is defined on semantic grounds.' In The Passive and the Notion of Transitivity The second sentence with its idiomatic use seems much more acceptable.Īddressing an underlying assumption in your fourth question (but with obvious overlaps to the others) I'd argue that simplistic views on what a 'direct object' should be considered as being are ill thought out and can soon lead to confusion. This problem has been gone into many times. The room has been gone into many times today. And this may also have something to do with the greater acceptability of idiomatic verb + prepositional phrases in the passive. No doubt the passive here would still be found questionable by some. If we wish to make the school our focus, not the decorators. The school was arrived at by the decorators shortly before dawn, and by late evening had been completely repainted The decorators arrived at the school shortly before dawn Clearly, the passive allows the speaker or writer to make a certain person or thing the subject of the discourse. Whether such constructions are considered acceptable has a lot to do with why we use the passive in the first place. In fact, all of the sentences listed can, in an exercise in syntax, be converted to the passive as follows: Google shows plenty of hits with the similar phrase " You are being toyed with". Active sentences with prepositional phrases can indeed be converted into passives, such as in the first example: The premise of the question, namely that " we need a direct object to form a passive sentence" is not correct.