Hello,

1. I know her.

What would be the passive form of the above sentence?

a) She is known to me.

b) She is known by me.

Hi,

An instance where I regularly hear this passive form of 'known' is this.

Some thug is killed by other thugs.

On the news, they don't say or write 'He had never been charged with a crime, but the cops knew he was a very bad guy'.

Instead, what they regularly say is 'He was known to the police'.

Best wishes, Clive

Hi,

'He was known to the police'.

Isn't "known" an adjective there? I know what you mean, and I wouldn't say you are wrong. Let me quote a little from a book I like, 'Teaching Tenses' by Rosemary Aitken. I like the way she looks at it.

In all passives, the past participle forms a kind of adjectival construction, and in simple forms it is difficult to determine where adjectives begin and passives stop. 'The window is broken', for instance, has two meanings: it can describe an ongoing state, or a repeated process (every cricket season). The state is usually regarded as an adjective, the repeated process as a passive. I n fact, it may be more helpful to the teacher to regard these as dynamic and passive forms of the same passive construction.

Best wishes, Clive