Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 577-8):
Many of the ‘enhancing’ verbal group complexes are simply inappropriate in the passive; they characterise an approach or attitude to the process, and this is likely to apply to an Actor but not to a Goal – it does not make much sense to say she hastened to be reassured, or your word ventures to be doubted. Others, such as happen and tend, are impersonal and so are indifferent to the selection of voice; e.g.The house happened to have been built facing the wrong way.
If the student is of the right calibre to pursue a course, which the Ministry enacts is a worthwhile full-time course, he shall receive the same justice from Britain whatever authority he happens to have been born under.
How I happened to be marooned at Balicou doesn’t interest you in the faintest degree.
One other aspect of oral work – the memorisation and speaking of prose and verse – tends to be considered by many teachers as quite extraneous to the normal class work.
If conduct in prison were a deciding consideration selection would tend to be left to a time near the date of release.
Since they are all metaphorical, in the sense that the verbal group is representing a circumstance and not some aspect of a process, the functional analysis provides only a partial interpretation; to get the full picture we would need to take account of the congruent form, e.g. by chance the house had been built facing the wrong way. There would be no change of role in the passive (see Figure 8-8).
