How to change the following sentence from active to passive voice?
- Paul married Lucy four years ago.
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Sign up to join this communityHow to change the following sentence from active to passive voice?
- Paul married Lucy four years ago.
That's an interesting question. Normally, a switch to the passive voice allows the subject in the active voice to be dropped. In the case of your example, this may give rise to an unwanted inference.
If the original used courted instead of married, you could drop the subject and change the tense of courted to produce
However, doing the same with married to produce
gives the impression that Lucy is no longer married.
This is the case with other verbs of the same type. That is, where using the past perfect looks like applying an adjective.
Marry verb 1 Join in marriage. ‘I was married in church’ ‘my sister got married to a Welshman’ - ODO
Married adjective 1.1 (of a person) having a husband or wife. ‘a happily married man’ - ODO
You have the same phenomena with the word employ. Compare:
The way to get around it is to use the form in the second dictionary example above: got married:
The passive-voice equivalent of this sentence is:
Lucy was married to Paul four years ago.
A good way of remembering the difference between active and passive sentences is to think first about the sentence's main verb. Is it being done to the sentence's main subject, or is the main subject the person/thing doing it?
For example:
Joe gave Shelly a gift for her birthday.
Active. The main subject Joe is doing the verb (giving something to Shelly)
Shelly was given a gift by Joe for her birthday.
Passive. The main subject (now Shelly) is on the receiving end of the verb