Passive structures are typically not tagged in corpora. You can, however, search for them using CQL. If you are new to CQL, please refer to our user guide or watch our video lessons on CQL.
First, think of what passive structures look like:
The book was written by Jack Kerouac.
Phones are used by everybody.
Passive structures are generally formed using the auxiliary verb 'be' + the main verb in the past participle.
Now, we need to translate this structure into the CQL like this:
[tag="VB.*"] [tag="VVN"]
Note ------------------
The tags are different in other languages (and sometimes in different corpora in the same language) To check the tagset of the corpus, go to the Corpus info page ⇢TAGSET. In this example, the English TreeTagger PoS tagset is used.
-------------------------
To capture structures such as 'will be tested' or 'have been written', we can modify the CQL to:
[tag="VH.*|MD"]? [tag="VB.*"] [tag="VVN"]
The screenshot shows where to find the Conocordance CQL option. (go to Advanced > Query type: CQL > write your query > click GO). It is highly recommended that you use the CQL BUILDER if you want to modify the query.