![]() ![]() Police say he killed five of his neighbours. Now, you can explain it for them: "It's because remained is an intransitive verb, so it cannot be used in the passive voice. The suspect, 38-year-old Francisco Oropeza, is a Mexican national who had reportedly been deported twice in 2009, then again in 20. If you look up the words in a dictionary, you'll see that elect is transitive, and remain is intransitive, which is why had been remained sounds so awkward to the native ear, while had been elected sounds just fine – although many native speakers might have a hard time explaining why. ![]() As Dave Sperling says on his ESL website:īecause subjects of passive verbs receive the action, verbs that cannot have objects (intransitive verbs) do not have passive forms. The key is that the sentence with elected is using the passive construction, but the sentence with remained has an active construction. So, the question becomes, why can the verb elected be used in this way, but not the verb remained? That's a valid formation, and it's listed as the past perfect passive verb form in this table 1: In that case, you can use he had been followed by a past participle, as in: This issue gets tricky, however, when you switch to the passive voice.
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