From what I’ve seen in Romance languages you can’t use the passive voice with an indirect object (either with a verb or passive pronoun). For example, in Spanish you can’t say word by word “i was told that”. It would need to be something like “they told me that”. To what extent does Portuguese work the same? I ask because as far as i can recall, I’ve seen it a few times. So how would these two sentences be translated:
a. the boy was given presents
b. the presents were given to the boy
@Jemmy, right, in Portuguese, the indirect object remains as such, rather than becoming the passive voice subject. So, either sentence would have the same translations in the passive voice (word order is flexible, so there’s a few different possibilities, but without affecting the classification of each element):
The first option would be the default one.
So for option a you couldn’t say “o menino foi dado os presentes” but instead “deram-se-lhe ao menino os presentes”?
@Jemmy, no, “o menino foi dado os presentes” is not a correct sentence. “Deram-se-lhe ao menino os presentes” is dubious, due to the redundancy - you can just say “Deram-se-lhe os presentes”. Using the passivating ‘se’, as you proposed here, is an acceptable alternative to the standard passive voice structure that I used in my previous post.