“The report said that the Schaku coupler had broken and this led to the derailment, resulting in the death of my son and injuries to several others,“
As per my knowledge above sentence should be in past perfect as passive voice i.e. should be use coupler had been broken.
My explanation:
If we use only had then it mean coupler must have broken by itself which is not possible. some doer has to be there to broke it.
Another E.g.
He had broken my Toy, which angered me a lot
And if we use had been Then it mean coupler must have broken by someone. It may have broken by miscreant or climate like overheating etc. It should be passive voice.
Another E.g.
My toy had been broken by him, which angered me a lot
If boken is used as adjective then it should be was broken
Or
It should be like
“The report said that the Schaku had broken coupler and this led to the derailment, resulting in the death of my son and injuries to several others,“
Please help
Best Answer
Your reasoning is on the right track, in that "had been broken" often would be read as implying agency or intent. However, had broken is perfectly correct here. In fact, you do not go far enough: if the article had said "had been broken," most native speakers would assume that some individual had broken it. There are some definite subtleties here, however.
First, let us recall that some verbs can be both transitive and intransitive. Broke is in fact one such verb. Either a subject can break an object, or an object can break, similar to how one can eat dinner or simply eat. However, since the subject is the physical recipient of the action in the first case, it is not so easy to see.
There are two ways that this sentence could be written, with three interpretations.
Really, this the past perfect way of saying it broke. No agency implied.
In most contexts, this would imply that some human had broken it. However, in this context, it would not:
In this case, broken is merely an adjective, not a past participle, and thus refers to a state, not an action. No intent is implied.
That said, this is Indian English, which is dialectically distinct from the version I speak, so certain rules might be a little different.