Change / be changed

Question

I find it hard to use the verb change. Sometimes, it is used in an active voice and sometimes, in a passive voice.

quotation is below
(1) Looks like a short passive sentence, but it isn't.
(1) The library is located on the other side of the campus.
One way we know this is not a passive is that it cannot be changed into a corresponding active sentence.

Q) Does the last sentence mean "we cannot change it into...?"
Can't I replace "be changed" to just "change?"

KrisBlueNZ · Accepted Answer

Yes, the last sentence does mean "we (or ONE) cannot change it into ..."
No, you can't replace "be changed into" with "change into".
CHANGE implies an agent; the THING that CAUSES the change. (The agent may be implicit in the sentence, however.)
A sentence is just words on paper; it cannot CHANGE by itself. It must BE CHANGED BY an agent, e.g. a person.
For a simple example, according to myth, an alchemist could CHANGE lead into gold. In this case the alchemist is the agent.
Another example is a nail left outside, which will rust, i.e. it will CHANGE from iron into iron oxide. In this case the agent is oxygen, but that is not stated in the sentence; colloquially, we speak as if the nail CHANGES BY ITSELF.

Similarly, we can say that an English word CHANGES its meaning according to context. In this case the word is not the agent; the context is the agent, I guess. But figuratively we say that the word CHANGES. In this case there is a DEFAULT IMPLICIT AGENT (my terminology, probably not something you'll find in an English book). By that I mean that when we say "the word 'set' changes its meaning according to context", we realise that the word itself is not the agent of change; the agent here is a change of context. This agent is the default implicit agent of change.
This is slightly different from your example because the example is talking about the act of changing the form of a sentence, from its current form into active voice; this change would have to be made deliberately, by a person. It's not appropriate to say "The sentence changes its grammatical form" because that statement has no default implicit agent.

In some cases, the active agent IS the thing that itself is changing, for example "A caterpillar CHANGES INTO a butterfly".
Also, you can CHANGE YOUR CLOTHES. Of course this doesn't literally mean that you change items of clothing into different items of clothing.
There are probably other special cases that apply to the word CHANGE. It is a versatile word.

So a sentence cannot CHANGE, because it cannot be an agent of change (it cannot CHANGE ITSELF, or CHANGE BY ITSELF), and there is no identifiable default implicit agent that would change the grammatical form of a sentence. The grammatical form of a sentence can only be changed by an explicit agent.

Phew! I hope you can decipher all of that!

P.S. That sentence CAN actually be changed to active voice (not very convincingly though): "The other side of the campus houses (or CONTAINS) the library".

Change / be changed

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