Tuesday, May 8, 2018

causative passive potential form


I've been reading into a little bit of more advanced grammar and am trying to get my head around the causative and the passive form. (yes yes N1 people. That's not actually advanced.)


The causative I think I can grasp and the passive form makes sense when English examples are given. Using them and recognising them in practice will of course be a different matter….but anyway.


One confusing thing was the similarity to the potential form. I saw a question elsewhere on this site which said you could tell the difference the bulk of the time since with the passive there will be a に。


Which is fair enough.


But then we come to the causative passive form. Which means someone made me do something (why does that need to be passive?) and it made me wonder…is there such a thing as a causative passive potential form?


What I mean is how would you get across sentences such as “It is possible that she may make you eat her cooking”? It strikes me that the double passive/potential makes this a somewhat iffy proposition.




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