Passive Voice of Simple Past Tense 1.

24 The verb to be : be, being, am. are, is, was, were, shall be, will be, has been, have been, had been, shall have been, will have been. 37 Be as the main verb has three basic patterns: Example a. John is a students be + a noun b. John is intelligent be + an adjective c. John was at the library be + a prepositional phrase Be function as an auxiliary verb as well as a copula. The copula, links nonverbal predicates i.e., nouns, adjectives, certain adverbials with their subject and serves as a carrier for tense and subject-verb agreement. 38 teacher Copula: John is tall In boston Auxiliary: John is talking to Susan. Progressive aspect Many students often confused in using active and passive verb forms. This is no surprising, because: a. Be is used make both passive verb-forms and active progressive tenses. b. Past Participles are used to make both passive verb-forms active perfect tense. Compare: He was calling. Active-past progressive He was called. passive-past simple He has called. Active-present perfect The most common problem in the use of auxiliary verb be is that students have a tendency to omit it. Second language learners have been observed to omit the copula regardless of whether or not their native language has an equivalent form. The other problem involves use of wrong from of be. The multiplicity of 37 Azar, op. cit., p. A6 38 Marianne Celce-Murcia and Diane Larsen freeman, the Grammar Book, p. 53. 25 forms explains while learners sometimes use the wrong form of the verb be in their speech or writing. 39 2 . Distinguishing Past Tense Form and The Past Participle Other difficulty in learning passive voice for students is distinguishing simple past and past participle, both in regular and irregular verbs. The passive voice is a form of the verb be am, is, are, was, were, been, being and a past participle usually past-tense verb. If the verb works with “have,” as in “have ___,” then it is a past participle. English verbs have two participles. One, called variously the present, active, imperfect, or progressive participle, is identical in form to the gerund, and indeed the term present participle is sometimes used to include the gerund. The term gerund-participle is also used. The other participle, called variously the past, passive, or perfect participle, is usually identical to the verbs preterit past tense form; though in irregular verbs the two usually differ. 40 According to L.G Alexander, “for regular verbs the past participle has the same form as the simple past tense: e.g., arrive, arrived, and arrived. For irregular verbs the simple past tense and the past participle can be formed in variety of ways: e.g., drink, drank, drunk. 41 Randolph Quirk and Sidney Greenbaum in A Students Grammar of the English Language give differences between irregular and regular verb: a. Irregular verbs either do not have the regular-ed inflection b. Irregular verb typically, but not necessary have variation in their base vowel: Choose-chosen, write-wrote-written. c. Irregular verb have a varying number of distinct form. Since the-s and – ingforms are predicable for regular and irregular verb alike. The only one forms that need be listed for irregular verb are the base V, the past V-ed1, and the past participle V-ed2. 42 39 Murcia and freeman, loc.cit. 40 http:en.wikipedia.orgwigipastparticiple, 23 Maret 2015. 41 Lg. Alexander, Longman English Grammar, London:Longman Group UK Limited, 1988, p. 171. 42 Randolph Quirk and Sidney Greenbaum, A student’s Grammar of the English Language, England: Pearson Education Limited,1990, p. 29.