 Re: How to parse a sentence in the passive voice?
Tdol
Thank you for your answer. An agent is a semantic description not a syntactic one.
From a syntactic point of view, any English sentence, whatever long it may be, can be divided to the following categories:
Subject
Verb
Subject Complement
Object Complement
Adverbial
A professor once told me that the "by..."clause is an adverbial. But I am not convinced at all! As you have correctly noted, it is an agent (thematically) so how can it be an adverbial?
For this reason I suggested that the passive sentence is simply a construction where we have a Subject connected to the Predicate with a linking verb (be).
Last edited by Mohammed Abu Risha; 21-Feb-2008 at 20:51.
Reason: Correcting the spelling of "complement"
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