V. VERB QUALITIES - UW-Parkside: Help for Personal Homepages

EXERCISE 5.08: Active to Passive--In transforming the following
active sentences into passive, be careful not to lose track of the
tense and aspect of the original:
1) Freddy had fixed the fence.
2) Greg was getting some gravy.
3) Helen will have hurt Harvey badly.
4) Iris isn’t ignoring the island.
5) Jack has just joined the Jacobins.
6) Kevin can’t have killed that kangaroo.
7) Laura is leaving Larry.
8) Maureen has been making the meatloaf.
9) Nate may be disappointing his nurse.
10) Ollie must have been ogling Olga.
11) Peter purchased Paula a pretty pickle.
12) Quincy was quietly giving his aunty a quince.
13) Robert had rarely bought Rachel roses.
14) Sally smiled at my sister.
15) Ted is ticking off the teacher.
16) Did Ulalume undervalue undies?
17) Will Vanna sell Victor her violin?
18) Was Walt washing his walking shoes?
19) Have you yanked Yanni’s pipes
20) Should Zelda zoom her camera?
BE is not the only over-worked verb in English. GET also has multiple uses, one of
which is as a quasi-auxiliary forming the passive in place of be.
There is an alternative form of the passive, in which a form of get is followed by a past
participle (en-participle):
(1) We got robbed by the referees.
This get-passive is one of the most common quasi-auxiliary constructions in English, but it
still sounds a bit colloquial and should be avoided in formal writing. As with the
kept-progessive, the quasi-auxiliary get cannot participate in INVERSION, so that questions
must be formed with DO-INSERTION. Sentences (2) and (4) below are acceptable, but
sentence (3) is not:
(2) Were we robbed by the referees?
(3) *Got we robbed by the referees?
(4) Did we get robbed by the referees?
Recognizing the get-passive is complicated by other informal uses of get as a catenative verb
followed by infinitives or gerunds:
(5) We got drinking Martinis.
(6) We got to see the parade.
In sentence (5), got is the equivalent of began, while in sentence (6) it is the equivalent of
were allowed to, and this is only a sample of its possible meanings. After be and have, get
may be the hardest-working verb in the language.
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