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If you have a question for Grammatically Speaking, please send it to GrammaticallySpeaking@tesol.org. We welcome all types of language questions.
Dear Leo,
How do you explain why we say this: “I have been married…” “I have been divorced…” I have been single…” versus “I have lived…” “I have eaten…”, etc. Is it feelings/state of being? I honestly don’t know how to explain it and haven’t been able to find the “rule” for this.
Thanks,
Beth
Dear Beth,
Thank you for your question.
Traditional Grammatical Explanation
Adjectives can be “original” adjectives such as “happy,” ”poor,” or “red.” They can also often be derived from verbs, using the present participle or “-ing form” for active adjectives (working girl, barking dog, the fighting Irish, etc.) and the past participle for a passive adjective (salted fish, broken record, etc.). The latter is related to a passive voice construction. (E.g., “In our standard method the fish were salted by being put in dry salt for two hours,” or “the record was broken by Marcus McGraw.”) We thus see that adjectives can appear as ”original” adjectives and “derived” adjectives.
In your question, you give two derived adjectives (married and divorced) and an original adjective (single). The key point here is that they are functioning as adjectives that describe the person speaking, which is why they are preceded by “been.” The participles in the second group do not have the “been” because these describe an action you have undertaken (living, eating), rather than, as you say, feelings or a state.
You could, of course, undertake the action of marrying or divorcing and say “I have married or divorced (someone).” This then focuses on the action—perhaps the ceremony/process—(and of course could be interpreted as the speaker being a clergyman or justice of the peace marrying or divorcing two other people) rather than the state.
A major reason that this construction can cause trouble is that as past participles take the role of being adjectives, it can be difficult to differentiate between a “noun be adjective” construction such as “The teacher is happy” and a passive construction “The teacher is hired,” when using a derived adjective. If we consider the sentence “The room was painted,” we can interpret that either as a noun-adjective combination or as a passive construction. Context would help, with the former looking like “When we first bought the house a decade ago, the room was painted a sickly green” (implying that the painting of the room had occurred before we bought the house) and the latter looking like “The room was painted by Chris, his brother, Tom, and his girlfriend, Liz” (focusing on the act of Chris, Tom, and Liz). In some cases, the distinction between the two may be clear, but in many it can include considerable overlap and even ambiguity.
Teaching Tips
The verb to be is a fundamental part of English, and does not always play the same role in other languages, which may not even have a direct equivalent. It can be useful, even at higher levels, to review the basic uses of the verb to be in English:
Remind students that the tense and form of the verb to be can be changed according to the context.
One confusion that can arise is when there are multiple auxiliary verbs in a clause. Thus two of the above uses of the verb to be can be combined, as in “Roach claims she is being persecuted by lawmakers.”
Language Notes
Note that one challenge is that not all transitive verbs that can appear as passive constructions easily collocate with nouns. Thus, we can have the passive construction “the man was seen,” but we would not generally say “the seen man.” In cases such as this, the meaning would be expected to be interpreted exclusively as a passive construction. There is no simple rule to explain which past participles can be used as adjectives and which cannot.
Another challenge is that a derived adjective can in some cases have a different meaning from its verbal counterpart. An example of this would be, “a decorated soldier,” versus “the room was decorated.”
Last Month’s Brain Teaser
Look at these two sentences. How would you explain the difference between them to
students?
He knows that she wanted more coffee.
He knows she wanted more coffee.
The first correct response:
I'd say there is no difference in the two sentences as deleting “that” is
an option for these clauses.
Dr. Sharon S. Moya
Basalt High School
Basalt, Colorado
Thank you, Sharon. As you note, we have the option of deleting that in noun clauses such as this. However, at lower levels, students can be confused by this optionality. At higher levels, students can benefit from an explicit understanding of an issue that most first-language users do not have. In fact, studies of corpora show that in conversation, we do not use that in great majority of noun clauses such as this. Thus we would much more likely say “He knows she wanted more coffee.” In writing, however, we would be more likely to use that. Although fiction writing is slightly more likely to delete that, newspaper writing is more likely to include it. Academic writing is even more likely to include that. The difference, then, primarily boils down to a difference of style and situation. Although both are indeed viable and grammatical, the former is preferred in the written context and the latter would be more appropriate when speaking.
This Month’s Brain Teaser
Look at these three samples of student writing. What error do all three sentences have in common? How would you address this in a teaching class?
- “I am excited for the next lecture.”
- “The class read it individually and started discussing about it.”
- “The "Hierarchy System" originated from 4th century China”
The first correct answer will be published in the next column of Grammatically Speaking.
Please e-mail your responses to GrammaticallySpeaking@tesol.org.
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Examples cited in this column are authentic examples of language use and are not the
author’s creations.
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