Passive Tense Sentence Question

[colloquium]

Originally Posted by Soup

Dawnstorm's post is right. Mine, post #4, is wrong and I have since modified it to reflect the changes.

1. She had him break her heart. <causative, active>
2. She had her heart broken. <causative, passive>

There are two basic causative structures - an active one (ex: "I had Mike fix my computer") and a passive one (ex: "I had my computer fixed"). It is often used with the following verbs: TO HAVE, TO LET, TO MAKE, TO GET, and a few others.

FREE ENGLISH GRAMMAR TEST - VERB TENSES: Causative form/Causative structures 2

Excellent.

You've also answered a question which I was going to ask in my last post, but decided not to for the sake of brevity.

It had to do with the difference between (for instance),

He had me fired - and - He had the mechanic service his car

The difference being, as you've explained with your own examples, that one's a passive, and the other an active causative construction. Explianed by the fact that in passive constructions, the object is the recipient of the action and in the active, the object is the doer of the action.


Subject Object
He had me fired. Passive

Subject Object
He had the mechanic service his car. Active

Thus they can easily be rewritten using the object as the subject in non-causative constructions.

I was fired (passive).

The mechanic serviced his car (active).


Phew! I think I've got it. I hope I've got it!

This thread has been very helpful.

Many thanks Soup and Dawnstorm.