Every now and then I get asked very complex grammar questions that defy easy answers. It’s because they involve not just one but a great number of rules of inflection and syntax dynamically interacting with one another. In other words, they are expert-level questions whose answers can only be understood by those already knowledgeable with the grammar concepts involved in the analysis.
Such was my predicament when Forum member ESL-GUY posted the following questions in my personal messages box in the Forum a month ago:
Dear Sir,
Do enlighten me on the following:
1. Does a post-noun modifier in an active-voice sentence have to be in the active voice, too? Take the sentences below for instance. I believe that all the participial modifiers below are short passives (i.e., without agents). I’m not sure, though, whether the shift in voice is justified.
1.1 “Last night, they watched the movie adapted from Ghandi's best-selling biography.”
1.2 “Movies based on true stories always move us.”
2. Should the sentences below be recast to make the parts after “which” and “that” active?
2.1 “I love novels that are set in the medieval period.”
2.2 “These romantic films, which are often written for the lovelorn, can influence the lives of many.”
2.3 “Submit the following documents, which can be obtained from ...”
3. Does the participle after the preposition “after” in the following sentence cause a shift in voice?
“After filling out the required forms, each client is given a reference number.”
4. What are the cases in which a shift in voice is justified? Can you please give examples?
Thank you very much.
My answer to ESL-GUY’s questions consisted of the three-part discussion below in my English-usage column in
The Manila Times for its September 26 and October 3 and 10, 2015 issues. Some of the analysis are admittedly tough to follow, but I trust that Forum members will find the discussions generally useful in enhancing their understanding of the mechanisms of the English language.
Outcomes of reducing subordinate clauses into adjective phrases Part 1: A set of four tough but very instructive grammar questions was sent to my personal messages box in Jose Carillo’s English Forum recently by a member who goes by the username ESL-GUY. The questions are rather advanced and need extensive analysis, so I’ll be answering them by set starting with the first one:
“
Set 1: Does a post-noun modifier in an active-voice sentence have to be in the active voice, too? Take the following sentences:
“1. ‘Last night, they watched the movie adapted from Ghandi’s best-selling biography.’
“2. ‘Movies based on true stories always move us.’
“I believe that all the participial modifiers in the two sentences above are short passives (i.e., without agents). I’m not sure, though, whether the shift in voice is justified.”
My reply to ESL-GUY:
Before going into the matter of voice and short passives, let’s first analyze the two sentences. Each is actually a so-called “reduced” version of a complex sentence, with an active-voice main clause (the independent clause) and a passive-voice subordinate clause (the dependent clause).
Sentence 1 is the reduced version of the complex sentence “Last night, they watched the movie
that was adapted from Ghandi’s best-selling biography,” where “they watched the movie” is the main clause and “that was adapted from Ghandi’s best-selling biography” the subordinate clause. This subordinate clause has been whittled down into an adjective phrase—a structurally simpler, more concise grammatical form—by doing away with the subordinating conjunction “that” and the linking verb “was.” The result is the reduced sentence “Last night, they watched the movie
adapted from Ghandi’s best-selling biography,” where the subordinate clause has become the participial phrase “adapted from Ghandi’s best-selling biography.”
Likewise, Sentence 2 is the reduced version of the complex sentence “Movies
that are based on true stories always move us,” where “Movies…always move us” is the main clause and “that are based on true stories” the subordinate clause. As in Sentence 1, the subordinate clause has been whittled down into an adjective phrase by doing away with “that” and “are,” resulting in the reduced sentence “Movies
based on true stories always move us.” Here, the subordinate clause has become the participial phrase “based on true stories” modifying “movies.”
The whittling down process that both sentences have undergone is what’s called the
“reduction of adjective clauses,” which converts a complex sentence into a single-clause, more concise sentence—in short, a simple sentence: “Last night, they watched the movie adapted from Ghandi’s best-selling biography.” “Movies based on true stories always move us.”
Now we can now answer ESL-GUY’s first question: “Does a post-noun modifier in an active-voice sentence have to be in the active voice, too?”
The answer is that the question doesn’t apply here. No shifting of voice takes place when a subordinate clause introduced by “that” followed by a linking verb is reduced to an adjective phrase. This is because the post-noun modifier formed by that reduction process is a participial modifier. Recall that only true verbs can undergo changes in voice, and that participial modifiers are
verbals that don’t function as true verbs but as adjectives.
ESL-GUY is correct, of course, that participial modifiers are
short passives or
agentless passives. Their defining characteristic is that they omit or do away with the doer of the action. This is obviously the case with the participial phrases “adapted from Ghandi’s best-selling biography” and “based on true stories,” as both have no actors or doers of the action.
In closing, let me reiterate that no voice shift whatsoever is involved when a subordinating clause is reduced into a short passive. In such cases, only the main clause of the complex sentence has voice—the active voice—and the main clause retains that voice even when its subordinate clause gets reduced into a short passive.
Part 2: Last week, I answered the first of a set of four tough grammar questions sent to my personal messages box in Jose Carillo’s English Forum by member ESL-GUY. The question was this: “Does a post-noun modifier in an active-voice sentence have to be in the active voice, too?”
He presented these examples: 1. “Last night, they watched the movie adapted from Ghandi’s best-selling biography.” 2. “Movies based on true stories always move us.” I pointed out that Sentence 1 is actually the reduced version of the complex sentence “Last night, they watched the movie
that was adapted from Ghandi’s best-selling biography,” and Sentence 2, the reduced version of the complex sentence “Movies
that are based on true stories always move us.”
Through a simplification technique called “reduction of adjective clauses,” Sentence 1 did away with the relative pronoun “that” and the linking verb “was,” resulting in the reduced sentence “Last night, they watched the movie adapted from Ghandi’s best-selling biography.” Sentence 2 similarly did away with “that” and “are,” resulting in “Movies based on true stories always move us.” Both complex sentences became simple sentences.
In such reduced sentences, the main clause retains its voice and no shifting of voice takes place when the subordinate clause gets reduced into a participial phrase. This is because participial modifiers don’t function as true verbs but as adjectives, and in English, only true verbs can undergo changes from active voice to passive voice or vice versa.
Now let’s proceed to ESL-GUY’s second set of questions:
“
Set 2: Should the sentences below be recast to make the parts after ‘that’ and ‘which’ active?’
“1. ‘I love novels that are set in the medieval period.’
“2. ‘These romantic films, which are often written for the lovelorn, can influence the lives of many.’
“3. ‘Submit the following documents, which can be obtained from ...’”
My reply to ESL-GUY:
I am perplexed by your question because in those three sentences, I don’t see any point in wanting to put the parts after ‘that’ and ‘which’ in the active voice. Those are complex sentences and the parts you refer to are actually subordinate clauses where there’s no doer of the action. In Sentence 1, no one is doing the action of setting the novels in the medieval period; in Sentence 2, no one is doing the action of writing those romantic films for the lovelorn; and in Sentence 3, no doer of the action can be discerned from the modifying clause “which can be obtained from…” In such situations, it would be highly problematic and grammatically abstruse to render the parts after “that” and “which” in the active voice.
Indeed, when a doer of the action is not evident or is unknown or uncalled for in a relative clause, the only voice possible for that clause is the passive voice, and the only form that the clause can take is as an agentless passive phrase—what you referred to as a “short passive”—introduced by the relative pronoun “that” and a linking verb. It would be extremely foolhardy to attempt recasting such clauses in the active voice—unless you can provide a contextually acceptable actor for the action in the subordinate clause and be able to revise the construction of the complex sentence without doing violence to its sense.
You will find, too, that subordinate clauses of the kind you presented are the ones that easily lend themselves to being reduced into post-noun modifiers by the dropping of the relative pronoun “that” and the linking verb. For instance, the complex sentence “I love novels
that are set in the medieval period” readily gets reduced to “I love novels
set in the medieval period,” where “set in the medieval period” becomes the participial post-noun modifier of “novels.”
Part 3: My two preceding columns answered tough grammar questions sent to my personal messages box in Jose Carillo’s English Forum by member ESL-GUY. The first was, “Does a post-noun modifier in an active-voice sentence have to be in the active voice, too?”, and the second, which I’ll condense here for clarity, was “Should sentences like ‘I love novels that are set in the medieval period’ be recast to make the parts after ‘that’ or ‘which’ active?”
These two questions can’t be easily answered because they require a clear understanding of the structure of complex sentences and of the whittling down process in English grammar known as “reduction of adjective clauses,” which converts subordinate clauses into structurally simpler adjective phrases (
http://tinyurl.com/l62xf39). I therefore had to show first how this is done—by dropping the conjunction “that” and the linking verb that connects that clause to the main clause.
Having done this, I answered both questions in the negative. To the first question, I explained that the main clause retains its voice and no shifting of voice takes place when the subordinate clause gets reduced into a participial phrase. This is because a participial phrase that acts as a post-noun modifier doesn’t function as a true verb but as an adjective, and in English, only true verbs have voice, whether active or passive.
To the second question, I said that in a sentence like “I love novels that are set in the medieval period,” it doesn’t make sense to put the parts after “that” in the active voice. That sentence is a complex sentence and the part referred to is actually a subordinate clause where there’s no doer of the action. That clause can therefore only take the passive voice.
Now let’s proceed to ESL-GUY’s third and fourth question:
“
Set 3: ‘Does the participle after the preposition ‘after’ in the sentence below cause a shift in voice?
“‘After filling out the required forms, each client is given a reference number.’
“
Set 4: ‘What are the cases in which a shift in voice is justified? Can you please give examples?’”
My reply to ESL-GUY:
Yes, there has been a voice shift in that sentence, but it’s incorrect to say that it was caused by the participle “filling out.” That sentence is actually the inverted form of the normal-order, passive-voice simple sentence “Each client is given a reference number after filling out the required forms.” Here, the passive-voice main clause “each client is given a reference number” is modified by the prepositional phrase “after filling out the required forms.”
We can also recognize that normal-order sentence as the reduced form of the complex sentence “
Each client is given a reference number after
he or she has filled out the required forms,” where the passive-voice main clause is linked by the subordinator “after” to an active-voice subordinate clause.
Now, in answer to the fourth question, this is actually one of the cases in which a shift in voice is possible during the reduction process. When the subordinate clause is in the active voice, as in “he or she has filled out the required forms,” English has a special procedure for reducing that clause into a prepositional phrase without altering its meaning—drop the pronoun and convert the active verb to its progressive form: “Each client is given a reference number
after filling out the required form.”
A voice shift is also possible when a complex sentence has an active-voice relative clause, as in “Students
who work part-time are often highly motivated to finish college.” In the relative clause “who work part-time,” “who” can be dropped and the verb “work” converted to its progressive form: “Students
working part-time are often highly motivated to finish college.” Here, the relative clause “who work part-time” has become the post-noun participial modifier “working part-time.”
