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I have come across a sentence in a passive voice exercise. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the answer key as it was published separately. To make it much challenging to change into the passive, the sentence shows different tenses which give rise to the discrepancy between the manifest structure and the implied meaning.

The sentence to change into the passive voice goes:

It's high time somebody told him the truth.

Any suggestions with some explanation, please?

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    This a case of passivisation of the subordinate clause, not the matrix clause. The logical passive version is: "It’s high time [he was told the truth by somebody]". Note that although "was" is a past tense form. it does not relate to past time. It's called a modal preterite.
    – BillJ
    Commented Jun 16 at 17:35
  • I do agree with you, still the main clause dominates the entire meaning as it refers to some necessary future action. I am not sure but we should change the past verb in the dependent clause into something similar to that of 'it's high time' expression.
    – Feras Muhaidat
    Commented Jun 16 at 17:39
  • @FerasMuhaidat Why would you "change the past verb"? In "It is high time that" you're using a simple present indicative. That verb form will not work in the clause it governs. It's just like "I wish that" in this regard. In any case, you have to leave that main clause alone.
    – tchrist
    Commented Jun 16 at 19:22
  • @tchrist the present reference of "high time" is for the moment of speaking which is not the same temporal frame of reference of the "telling", or is it?
    – Feras Muhaidat
    Commented Jun 16 at 20:32
  • @FerasMuhaidat You're right that there is a difference between “It is high time that...” versus “It was high time that...”. But you aren’t going to change the main clause at all; that would not make any sense given how there’s no transitive verb whose object complement you could promote into the subject of an inflected be + past participle form of that transitive verb — because you’ve already started with be being used in a copula, and that cannot be passivized.
    – tchrist
    Commented Jun 16 at 20:42

1 Answer 1

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You just flip somebody told him into he were told by somebody. So the original:

  1. It’s high time (that) somebody told him the truth.

becomes this if promoting the indirect object to subject:

  1. It’s high time (that) he were told the truth by somebody.

or this if promoting the direct object to subject:

  1. It’s high time (that) the truth were told to him by somebody.

It would be more common to promote the indirect object as in (2) than the direct object as in (3).

In formal writing, it would be were not was in the passive version. That’s because the verb following it’s (high) time (that) has historically been in what was once called the past subjunctive in earlier forms of English, and which is retained morphologically only with be. Casual conversational language and writing in a less-than-formal register would more often use was, though, especially in the UK rather than the US.

Occasionally these it’s time constructions take for–to infinitives instead of that clauses:

  1. It’s high time for somebody to tell him the truth.

would become

  1. It’s high time for him to be told the truth by somebody.

or, at least in theory, but it sounds pretty bad:

  1. It’s high time for the truth to be told to him by somebody.

In comments to the original question, the asker wondered what an equivalent simple sentence might be so that we don’t have two different clauses to consider. I had this to offer:

For comparable simple sentences instead of complex ones, with minimal meaning change, I would use the strongest deontic modal of obligation available (ᴍᴜsᴛ) and then add something like finally/belatedly/at last/at long last to incorporate the ‘high time’ notion that this truth-telling is overdue. So perhaps “Someone must finally tell him the truth” paired with “He must finally be told the truth” will work for your non-complex versions, although I cannot recommend “The truth must finally be told to him” for most (if perhaps not quite ᴀʟʟ conceivable) circumstances.

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  • Thanks for the rich information, but don't you think that the indirect object hasn't been told the truth yet? According to Bollinger's principle, your sentence with the infinitive still refers to a future action.
    – Feras Muhaidat
    Commented Jun 16 at 17:03
  • @FerasMuhaidat What do you mean? These all refer to things that have not happened yet. Nothing already happened. Did you think told represented a real past event that actually happened already not an imaginary possibility yet to be realized? It’s just like what happens in It would be better if somebody told him the truth. That’s not a real past; it means the same thing as It would be better if someone were to tell him the truth.
    – tchrist
    Commented Jun 16 at 17:08
  • I think you already gave a valid answer in your question! I mean we should think along these lines, such as "would be better", to capture the implicature of the statement. Perhaps we should replace the unreal past verb with another that gives almost the same meaning of 'it's high time' expression. The unreal past can mean hypothetical situations, like the one you just used, but it can also mean different things, like the statement in my question.
    – Feras Muhaidat
    Commented Jun 16 at 17:28
  • What do you mean it's something different in the statement in your question? Both It’s time he do something and It’s time he did something alike represent unreal, "not yet done" situations; the difference is that the second is more remote a possibility than the first because backshifting is one way to add remoteness; it's also more traditional.
    – tchrist
    Commented Jun 16 at 17:33
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    I thought that the debate over If I were and If I was long over. I always use were when speaking to put off all manner of creeps.
    – Lambie
    Commented Jun 17 at 0:35

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