Navigating English Grammar by Anne Lobeck

Author:Anne Lobeck
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-07-04T00:00:00+00:00

Our SAI test also confirms these are syntactic subjects:

Is the ivy climbing the trellis?

Is the boy climbing the trellis?

Subjects of passive sentences

Now, consider these passive sentences. What is the syntactic subject of each of these sentences? Well, you just need to apply SAI to find out!

The ice was melted by the sun.

Was the ice melted by the sun?

The trellis was climbed by the boy.

Was the trellis climbed by the boy?

Here, the syntactic subjects of the passive sentences (the ice and the trellis, respectively) invert with the auxiliary verb was, even though neither of these syntactic subjects is also the logical subject of the clause. (Remember that in passive sentences, the logical subject, the sun and the boy, shows up in a prepositional phrase at the end of the clause.)

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