[Grammar] Their house has been destroyed in/by a fire

[NAL123]

1) Their house has been destroyed in a fire.

2) Their house has been destroyed by a fire.

Qa) Are they both correct, and do they mean the same thing?

Qb) I think (1) and (2) are both passive voice sentences whose active voice would be: "A fire/Fire has destroyed their house." Am I right?
If so, Can I say that it is not always necessary, in a passive voice sentence, for the agent (here "a fire") to be in a prepositional phrase headed by the preposition "by"?

 

[jutfrank]

Qa) The sentences mean effectively the same thing, yes, in that they both have the same informational content. The difference in meaning given by the different prepositions does not affect the sentence meaning.

Now before you go on to ask about where else the difference in meaning lies, I'll ask you to tell us where you got these sentences from. My suspicion is that you saw 1 somewhere and then made up 2 yourself, in an attempt to understand the use of the preposition in in 1. Is that right? If so, please tell us before we begin to attempt any unnecessary explanations.

As a general piece of advice for using the forum efficiently for both you and us, do not attempt to make up sentences yourself and then ask us what they mean. What you should have done here is provide us with sentence 1 only, and then enquire about the use of in and why the speaker chose to use it.

Qb) Yes, both verb phrases (has been destroyed) are identical and are in the passive voice. Yes, what you say about the active voice transformation is reasonable.

Can I say that it is not always necessary, in a passive voice sentence, for the agent (here "a fire") to be in a prepositional phrase headed by the preposition "by"?

A very short and simple answer would be yes. A long answer would involve going into what can and cannot be considered agency. I don't think the fire is an agent in either of them, certainly not in 1. However, I don't particularly want to go into the semantics right now. Let's just say that it's reasonable to say that the fire is what destroyed the house in both sentences.

 

[emsr2d2]

At its simplest, both houses burned down.