Teaching Spanish Three Passive Constructions versus English Passive Voice
Keywords:
passive constructions, passive voice, English passive voice, Spanish passive constructions, Spanish and English passive formsAbstract
There are several differences when forming the passive in Spanish and English. Spanish has passive constructions and English passive voice. Firstly, there is only one main way of constructing the passive voice in English, which is by promotion. That means from an active sentence following the subject +verb +object (SVO) pattern, promotion takes the object and positions it as the subject. In other words, the one being discussed (subject in the active sentence) turns into the receiver of the action (patient). For such reasons, only transitive verbs (the ones that allow direct objects) may be used in the English passive voice. On another note, Spanish constructions are different from English and there are three ways of forming them: ‘passive ser’, ‘passive estar’ and ‘passive se’. However, Spanish ‘passive ser’ is the closest form to the English passive voice. This study is based on secondary research that describes and compares Spanish passive constructions and English passive voice.
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