The same electrician, five times
One event: an electrician spent three days rewiring your flat, and you paid him.
A. An electrician rewired the flat. · B. The flat was rewired. · C. The flat was rewired by an electrician. · D. We rewired the flat. · E. We had the flat rewired.
Five questions. All five sentences are grammatical.
1. Which one is false?
2. Which would you write in a property listing?
3. Which would you say to a friend who asked where your savings went?
4. Which one is almost never worth writing?
5. Which one is about the electrician rather than about the flat or about you?
What the construction actually encodes
Not causation. Affectedness.
Unit 22 made the point that the passive is a camera position: it decides who is in the frame and who is behind it. The causative is the third position on the same tripod. An electrician rewired the flat puts the electrician in the frame. The flat was rewired puts the flat there and leaves the frame otherwise empty. We had the flat rewired puts you there — not doing the work, but deciding it, paying for it and answering for it.
That is the ordinary account, and for most sentences it is enough. It also cannot be the whole story, because of a set of sentences that everybody produces and nobody plans. She had her bag stolen. He had his licence taken away. We had two windows broken in the storm. I had a tooth knocked out playing football. Same grammar. Nobody commissioned any of it.
So the construction is not encoding causation. What it encodes is affectedness: the subject is the person the event happened to, and the person it matters to. Commissioning is simply the commonest way of being affected by something you did not do yourself — you paid, so it is yours. Theft is another way. A storm is another.
There is a useful consequence, and it explains an error that is otherwise puzzling. The object of a causative is almost always yours: your flat, your hair, your bag, your licence, your tooth. I had my neighbour’s flat painted sounds odd not because it breaks a rule but because you appear to have no stake in it — and it stops sounding odd the moment we learn you were paying. The construction wants somebody with something at risk.
One last practical point about naming. We had the surveyor look at the roof names a person; we had the roof looked at does not. Naming is worth doing only when the identity does work — a trade, a specialist, somebody the listener will recognise. Otherwise it puts a stranger in the sentence for no reason, and the reader has to carry them to the end of the paragraph.
Three questions.
1. Why can the construction not be encoding causation?
2. What does it encode instead?
3. Why is I had my neighbour’s flat painted odd?
The choice, and the stake
One event, five sentences, five different subjects
| Sentence | What it is a fact about | When you would use it |
|---|---|---|
| An electrician rewired the flat. | The electrician | When the person matters: a recommendation, a complaint, a story with him in it. |
| The flat was rewired. | The flat | A survey, a listing, a report — anywhere nobody’s responsibility is the point. |
| The flat was rewired by an electrician. | The flat, plus a redundancy | Almost never. Who else would have? An agent worth naming is one the reader could not guess. |
| We rewired the flat. | You, holding the tools | Only if you did. This is the sentence Portuguese hands you by accident. |
| We had the flat rewired. | You, holding the invoice | Most of the time, in speech and in writing. It is the default for adult life. |
The stake test. A causative needs a subject with something at risk, and the object is nearly always theirs.
I had my hair cut · she had her bag stolen · we had two of our windows broken · he had his licence taken away.
Which is why the misfortune use is not an exception to be memorised separately. It is the clearest evidence of what the construction has meant all along: this happened to something of mine, and I am the one who has to deal with it.
Eight sentences. Match each to what it actually claims.
Four questions.
1. What do the commissioning uses and the misfortune uses share?
2. What is wrong with I had my hair cut by a hairdresser?
3. When is naming the person worth doing?
4. In a survey report on a house you are buying, which do you expect?
Choosing the frame
Eight gaps, from a letter to an insurer. Every option is grammatical. Choose the one that puts the right person in the frame.
I am writing about claim reference 44/8812. On the night of the 3rd we in the storm, and water came through the ceiling of the back bedroom for about six hours before we found it. The following morning we , at our own expense, because your emergency line was engaged for two days. He charged £340 and I have attached the invoice.The property in 2019 by the previous owners, and the survey we commissioned at the time noted no problem with the roof. I that survey to this letter.Since then we twice — once last week and once yesterday — and both assessors said the same thing, which is that the tiles are original and the flashing is not. I would like by somebody independent, and I am willing to pay for that myself if your assessor’s report is going to say otherwise.Finally: my partner on the night, moving a bookcase out of the water, and has been off work since. That is a separate claim and I this week.
Eight sentences. Seven need work; one is correct as written.
1. Our flat was renovated last year. — in a conversation about where your savings went
2. I had my brother’s car repaired. — your brother arranged and paid for it
3. The letter was written by me.
4. He had taken away his licence. — the court took it
5. We had broken two windows in the storm. — the storm broke them
6. I had my hair cut by a hairdresser.
7. She got repaired her laptop.
8. We had the roof inspected before we bought the house. — correct as written
Same event, three sentences
Task card · Speaking · Pairs · 10 minutes
Five events from your own last year — anything that involved somebody else doing something to something of yours.
Three versions of each, out loud, and then a decision with a reason attached.
- For each event say the active, the passive and the causative. All three, even when two of them sound absurd.
- Then choose the one you would actually use, and say the context that makes it right — a listing, a complaint, a conversation with a friend, an insurance letter.
- Your partner’s job: ask who is this sentence about? after each choice. The answer should be a person or a thing, never “the event”.
- Find one event where you would genuinely use the passive. If you cannot, that is worth knowing — it means everything in your year had an owner.
Who your sentences were about
Two questions.
1. Which version did you choose most often?
2. Where did the passive turn out to belong?
Something at stake
Two questions. Twenty seconds.
1. What does the causative put in the frame?
2. What is the object of a causative almost always?
Next. Twenty-six minutes on one complicated arrangement of your own — a renovation, a move, a visa, a wedding — told to somebody who has to be able to draw the timeline afterwards.