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HUNGARIAN-ENGLISH GRAMMATICAL CONTRASTS: THE VERB PHRASE The next step is to learn the uses of the Passive. At school learners are often told that the Passive is used in English when the agent is not known or is unimportant. However, this is only true of the short passive, where the agent is not specified. It is different with the long passive, where the agent is expressed by a prepositional phrase. The long passive is often used to lend special emphasis to the agent by giving it end focus: St Paul’s Cathedral, dating from the late 17th century, was designed in the English Baroque style by Sir Christopher Wren. In this case the agent is very important, since it comes last in the sentence, and in English we have end-focus (i.e., the end of the sentence receives sentence stress, and it contains the most important new information). Consider these sentences too: A bort megitták. — The wine has been drunk. (The agent is unkown or unimportant.) A diákok megitták a bort. — The students drank/have drunk the wine. (Stress falls on the word wine; this is the most important piece of new information.) A didkok ittak meg a bort. — The wine was/has been drunk by the students. (Special emphasis is laid on the noun phrase the students.) In this way, the choice between the Active and the Passive depends on what is new information in the sentence. However, it also depends on register: in oral communication the Active, while in written registers the Passive is preferred. The most common Hungarian correspondent of the long passive is an active sentence, in which the agent (realised by a prepositional phrase in English) is moved to subject position. The short passive also corresponds to the Active, with a 3" person plural verb expressing an indefinite subject. However, there are some other Hungarian constructions that regularly correspond to the English Passive: The house was painted white. — 1. A házat fehérre festették. — 2. A ház fehérre volt festve. This picture was painted by Dürer. - Ezt a képet Dürer festette. The window was shut. — Az ablak becsukódott. The rules must be adhered to. — À szabályokhoz ragaszkodnunk kell. My hat has been sat on. — Valaki ült a kalapomon. He was denied entry. — Megtagadták tőle a belépést. « 55 ¢
