I have never seen any use of 'passive voice' in a conditional sentence before.
I was reading a story book and found one of the story characters saying,
What would have happened if the bridge had broken.
Is this sentence grammatically correct? A bridge cannot break itself, it gets broken. So shouldn’t it be,
What would have happened if the bridge had been broken.
Best Answer
"Break" has both a transitive and intransitive meaning.
is perfectly idiomatic and grammatical.
We tend to use the verb transitively when the cause of the breakage is known. We tend to use the verb intransitively when the cause is unknown.
It is, however, odd to use "break" with something as massive as a bridge. We tend to use "fall" or "collapse,"