Learn English – How many passive tenses are there in English
grammarpassive-voice
I know there are 16 active tenses in English. What about passive tenses?
Also I don't know what the difference is between tenses and voices and which of them I must use.
update:
I mean, this is table:
Best Answer
I think it is better to say that English has two tense systems: an inflectional system contrasting preterite and present, and an independent analytic tense system contrasting perfect and non-perfect, where non-perfect is not a tense but the absence of perfect tense. The perfect tense can combine with preterite and present tense but can also occur in clauses without inflectional tense.
Preterite and perfect are both instances of the more general tense 'past'. Preterite is the primary (inflectional) past tense, while perfect is the secondary (analytic) past tense.
Since the perfect is a past tense, you could say that English thus has only two tenses, present and preterite.
Voice and aspect have nothing to do with tense, and of course English has no future tense, despite what you may have read or been told.
The difference between active and passive is not whether there is an 'action' but the syntactic role of the person or thing 'acted upon'.
In a sentence cast in the active voice, the subject is the Agent - the 'doer' - and the direct object is the Patient - the one 'acted upon' or 'done to'.
Agent loves Patient.
When that sentence is recast in the passive voice, the Patient becomes the subject and the Agent disappears, or is relegated to a prepositional phrase.
Patient is loved [by Agent].
So intransitive verbs - verbs which do not take a direct object - cannot be cast in the passive voice, because there's no Patient to become the subject of a passive sentence.
Agent dies. ... there's no Patient who can ✲'be died by'!
BE is an intransitive verb: it has no Patient, only an Agent to whom some quality is imputed, so it cannot be cast in the passive voice. It is always active.
One way is to provide an indefinite subject such as "people" or "they" or "we":
What will happen when people start to use metallic elements, &c?
Another is to make the passive subject the active subject of the first verb:
What will happen when metallic elements start to be used, &c?
This is permitted with verbs like start,begin,continue,finish,stop which don't really signify an action but act as semi-auxiliaries to tell you the temporal "shape" of the action verb - what grammarians call its aspect.
Actions and tasks and projects can be "started" or "finished", but we speak of an object being "started" or "finished" only if it is being treated as a task or project: "I started my paper today" means "I started writing my paper".
Best Answer
I think it is better to say that English has two tense systems: an inflectional system contrasting preterite and present, and an independent analytic tense system contrasting perfect and non-perfect, where non-perfect is not a tense but the absence of perfect tense. The perfect tense can combine with preterite and present tense but can also occur in clauses without inflectional tense.
Preterite and perfect are both instances of the more general tense 'past'. Preterite is the primary (inflectional) past tense, while perfect is the secondary (analytic) past tense.
Since the perfect is a past tense, you could say that English thus has only two tenses, present and preterite.
Voice and aspect have nothing to do with tense, and of course English has no future tense, despite what you may have read or been told.