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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| DaisyMaisy Senior Member United States Joined 5325 days ago 115 posts - 178 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish Studies: Swedish, Finnish | Message 25 of 28 27 September 2014 at 2:58am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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It sounds perfectly normal to me and conveys the message perfectly.
It does look like an awkward redundant construction so I can see the point of those who don't like it. I think it's one of those things that if you have to stop and think about it, it looks awful. If you process the meaning without really thinking about it because it is so familiar, it is fine. "I kept having to" is very common. You could say "I told him repeatedly" but there is a different nuance to each statement. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5171 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 26 of 28 16 March 2015 at 7:36pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I thought it might be worthwhile to recover this from the Week that Never Was.
Message 28 (which includes 26 and 27), 01 March 2015 at 7:06am by Gemuse:
Edited by mrwarper on 16 March 2015 at 7:41pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5171 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 27 of 28 16 March 2015 at 7:51pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Messages 29-32 of the parallel thread:
Message 29, 01 March 2015 at 8:37am by mrwarper (me):
Not exactly. Active/passive switching is done on a per clause basis -- by (inadvertently?) inserting "which" you move "was made by..." to a relative subordinate clause which is indeed in the passive. However, with that wording, in the main clause you are still saying "The noise [...] was unbearable.", which has a predicate adjective / linking verb, so many grammarians would prefer to speak of "linking sentences" (sorry, forgot if that's the right English term) instead of "active voice", and is in fact totally equivalent to the original "The noise the children made was unbearable."
Passive/active voice is all about what form of an action verb is used in a sentence. If you happily alter the wording while trying to keep the meaning and use a linking verb (f.e. to be), you'll send active/passive voice conversion down the drain. In the active voice, simple sentences (no subordinate clauses) have the following, simple enough, structure: <Somebody/something (the subject)> <does something/acts/takes action>. which is intuitively "active", I think -- by <does something> I mean [any action verb in any appropriate 1st/2nd/3rd person or tense, including past, future conditional tenses, etc]. If stuff is added without altering that verb, you have a complexer sentence, but still in the active voice. Now, please note that only some active sentences can be switched to the passive voice and back. What makes this possible is the presence of an object, so simple active and 'reversible' sentences have the following structure: <The subject> <acts> <on the object>. in the active voice, and <The object> <is acted on> [<by the subject>]. in the passive. This is merely altering the wording to turn whatever the object in the active structure was into the subject of a new structure, which we call the passive. Again, all of this works within a simple structure, and thus ignoring any subordinate or coordinate clauses. Each of those, if present, has its own structure which may again be the subject of passive/active switches. I can go on this forever, so please tell me if that is enough. For now I'll wrap up this getting back at your example: Active: I could not bear the noise [that blah blah blah]. Passive: The noise [that blah blah blah] could not be born [optionally: by me]. (and yes, funny wording) Note how "bear" is an action verb. You can say [almost] the same thing using a linking verb (i.e. "The noise the children made was unbearable."), so that precise main clause can't be switched between active and passive. ----8<---- ----8<---- ----8<---- ----8<---- ----8<---- ----8<---- Message 30, 01 March 2015 at 9:02am by Gemuse
----8<---- ----8<---- ----8<---- ----8<---- ----8<---- ----8<---- Message 31, 03 March 2015 at 12:54pm by mrwarper (me): Don't trust me on German (isn't that another thread anyway?) :) "The book was not to be read" is in the passive voice, because the book is read by somebody, which in the active would be "That person was not to read the book." ----8<---- ----8<---- ----8<---- ----8<---- ----8<---- ----8<---- Message 32, 03 March 2015 at 7:47pm by Doitsujin
Edited by mrwarper on 16 March 2015 at 7:55pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5004 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 28 of 28 16 March 2015 at 8:33pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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If what you mean is that you had to tell her a great many times, then "I kept repeatedly having to tell her" is OK,
but redundant, and "repeatedly" serves as emphasis, like emk said. Using redundancy for emphasis in this way is considered inelegant in formal language, but it's not "wrong." If what you mean is that you repeatedly had to execute the action of "repeatedly telling her," (e.g. every week you work with her for one hour, and every time, you have to tell her 10 times in that hour) then you can say "I kept repeatedly having to tell her," but this is unfavored because "repeatedly" can be interpreted as a redundant or emphatic way to express the idea of "kept having to tell her." In this case, you should instead say "I kept having to repeatedly tell her" or, if you're a pedant and don't like to split infinitives, "I kept having to tell her repeatedly." 1 person has voted this message useful |
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