Learn English – Making passive sentences into interrogative sentences

passive-voice

How do I make an interrogative voice sentence from a passive voice sentence?
For example, we have the following sentence:

They will be offered in the fall semester.

How can I make this sentence into an interrogative voice sentence?
Does this work well?

Will they be offered in the fall semester?

Thanks for your help

Best Answer

The passive applies as though auxiliaries were not present, and then any auxiliaries take part in subject-auxiliary inversion just as they would in an active sentence. This is one of the arguments for deriving auxiliaries from outside the core part of a sentence (by a version of Subject Raising).

So, without passive, we have

  1. will [ someone offer courses ]
  2. someone will offer courses (by Subject-Raising)
  3. will someone offer courses? (by Subject-Aux Inversion)

And with passive, we have

  1. will [ someone offer courses ]
  2. will [ courses be offered by someone ] (by Passive applying to lower clause)
  3. courses will be offered by someone (by Subject-Raising)
  4. will courses be offered by someone? (by Subject-Aux Inversion)

Examples with more complicated sets of auxiliaries work the same: "Courses should have been being offered" = "Someone should have been offering courses".

This is an outline of the treatment in McCawley's TSPE.

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