What does this sentence mean?

Either he’s saying that he’s innocent, or he’s saying that he’s guilty of a different murder. Or he’s a cop, and that’s not one of his cases.

@papayalily :If you make the sentence “I have not involved in that murder case.” then it seems meaningful.or Do these two sentences are correct? i am confused.

@lessonenglish I am not involved in that murder case.

1) “I am not involved in that murder case.”
“Involved” is an adjective in this sentence.
“Am” is the passive verb

2) “I involved myself in that murder when I called the police”
“Involved” is an active verb in this sentence

@jaytkay Thanks! :)

@lessonenglish This seems more like a case of “be + adjective” to me. That is, “involved” is an adjective and the sentence is not passive. But I’m afraid I can’t explain why I think this.

A clear passive would be something like:
I was involved in the murder case by the police.
the active version:
The police involved me in the murder case.

The line between passive and “be + adjective” is sometimes hard to see.

@jaytkay – with due respect, I disagree.

@lessonenglish – This sentence is in the present perfect tense. That means using the present tense of the verb “to be” plus a past participle, “am involved.” Of course “not” is an adverb and “in that murder case” a prepositional phrase.

This is not in passive voice. Passive voice for this sentence would be, “That murder case is one in which I am not involved.”

The sentence simply means that the speaker, probably some law official, is not dealing with any part of the murder case that was being discussed.

@Frteach It’s definitely not the present perfect. The present perfect is formed from “have” (not “be”) plus the past participle.

@morphail – when you use a form of “have” plus the past participle you get the past perfect tense, not the present perfect.

@Frteach No. The present perfect uses the present tense of “have”:
The police have involved me in the murder case.

The past perfect uses the past tense of “have”:
The police had involved me in the murder case.

@ morphail – You know you’re right. I guess my French grammar and English grammar have had their wires crossed today. Since it’s summer vacation, I can’t say I blame them! lol
I guess you have a higher degree than I, or you are allowed caffeine in the mornings. I am not. :(

definitely not passive voice

“I have not been involved in that murder case”; the sentence implies an ongoing lack of involvement.

He may not be directly involved in this particular murder case, but he could be involved in other murder cases. i would weigh this answer, based on his past criminal record and other facts.

Can we describe “am” as a state of being verb? In that case, “Involved” becomes the predicate adjective. So the verb is active, much like saying “I am happy.”

@Frteach I still see a passive sentence with ‘involved’ as an adjective.

Passive sentences with an adjective
“I am sleepy…”
“I am not sleepy…”
“I am involved…”
“I am not involved…”

Present perfect
“I have involved myself…”
“I have not involved myself…”
“The police have involved me…
“The police have not involved me…”

@jaytkay None of your examples are passive. The passive is formed from a form of “be” plus the past participle, for instance, “I was attacked by a tiger”.

“Sleepy” is not a past participle. If it’s “be” plus an adjective, then it’s not passive.

@morphail What about my present perfect examples?
That is my last comment. I am in over my head.

@lessonenglish
My apologies for making this more confusing.

@jaytkay No, your present perfect examples are active, not passive. They do not consist of “be” plus a past participle.

There is an interesting use of passive voice that is becoming part of our culture. It’s the “damage control” speech. The celebrity uses passive voice without a pronoun identifying him- or herself to “admit” the problem and then uses active voice for positive intentions:

Yes, mistakes were made [by me]. Now, I’m am looking forward to getting back to work.

I believe the theory is that the passive voice is more difficult to process, so the listener automatically focuses on the following positive pronouncement rather than the admission of guilt.

@morphail Sorry I was not specific.

I meant to say I think the original sentence is not present perfect.
I think these examples are present perfect. Is that correct?

@6rant6 “mistakes were made”

Richard Nixon famously said that about the Watergate burglary and coverup, and was ridiculed for not admitting that people were involved.

As if the mistakes were not committed by anyone. They were simply “made”.

@jaytkay yes that’s correct.

I am not involved in that murder case.
The verb is “to involve.” It’s a transitive verb: it takes an object. The object is acted upon by the verb.

The active form of it is “to involve <someone or something>,” the something being the object of the verb.
The police involved me in that murder case.

The passive form is “to be involved.” The verb “to be” by itself is not passive. But it is used to form the passive voice of any transitive verb.

The present tense of the verb “to be” is conjugated as “am, are, is, are, are, are.” “Am” is the first-person singular, present tense.

To form the passive of the verb, you take the verb “to be” + the past participie of the verb. “Involved” is the past participle. The past participle can be used as an adjective, but here it is part of a passive verb.

The main verb governs the tense. “Am” is in the present tense. The sentence is in the present tense. It is not any form of past anything. The participle forms the passive but does not determine tense.

In a passive sentence, the subject (here, “I”) is not the doer of the verb but is done to by the verb—acted upon by the verb.

This sentence is in the present tense and the passive voice.

@Jeruba How do you know it’s passive and not “be” plus adjective?

I would say it is an adjective because it can be modified:
I am not very involved in that murder case.

Passives can’t be modified like this.
*I was very attacked by a tiger.

@morphail, because the adjective is a past participle. A participle is a verb first.

I call it passive because that is how the passive voice is defined. As a matter of practicality, it works out pretty much the same in this case. But unless we mean to eliminate the passive voice simply by reanalyzing all passive constructions as adjectival, we have to apply the definition of the passive to all instances of that construction.

In this instance, with a word like “involved,” there isn’t much difference between a linking verb + adjective and a passive: here the state is very much like a condition of being acted upon. But that distinction is not always so subtle.

For the sake of ease of discussion, let’s eliminate the distractor “not” in this sentence and look at it in the positive:
I am involved in that murder case.
If you used a linking verb other than “to be,” the sense of it is little affected. There isn’t very much difference between that and
I remain involved in that murder case.
Some, but not much.

But suppose you chose another verb: say, “to beat.”
I was beaten by my father every night after dinner.
This is not a state with “to be” + adjective. It is definitely an action, with an agent and one who is acted upon. It is a passive construction. It is the same passive construction.

Two expressions can have the same meaning; that is not an argument for their being grammatically identical.
The house was white.
The house was painted white.
Mean the same thing?
The house was painted.
How about that?

“A participle is a verb first.”
Surely it’s a verb or an adjective depending on how it functions in the sentence. What do you think of my argument above that it’s an adjective if it can be modified? We don’t have to call all instances of “be + participle” passive.

Well, I don’t agree with your modification. (Which wasn’t there when I posted my reply, so I didn’t address it.)

I was taught (and that is an argument that I never accept as an authority for anything, so I don’t offer it as an authority now) that it is incorrect to say “I am not very involved” because something-mumble-mumble having to do with the fact that it is a participle and that instead you must say “I am not very much involved” (“we were very much surprised,” “she was very much pleased”). I regard the teacher who taught me this as a true and certifiable expert, but he is long dead and I can’t present his credentials.

He did spend considerable class time on this and was very emphatic about it. I’m certain of my memory, but from a distance of more than 40 years I can’t present his explanation. I can say that in all these years none of his teachings has ever been disproved and so I regard them as grammatical bedrock, but I don’t expect my belief to be sufficient to establish authority in the eys of anyone else.

I’m not sure how I would research this, but I can try.

Nonetheless, I think your reasoning is backward. It opens the door to all sorts of fallacies and irrational arguments. Suppose I said: “I can say ‘I seen you on the street yesterday,’ and therefore a past participle does not require an auxiliary verb.” How can you respond to that except to say that I can’t say it because the past participle does require an auxiliary verb? We don’t argue from usage to grammar. Maybe usage and grammar are at odds at times, and maybe usage changes grammar, but once changed it is grammar. You can’t prove grammar by usage.

I don’t see how you can challenge the statement that a participle is a verb first. A participle is a form of a verb. It is conceived as a verb and conjugated as a verb and takes its meaning from the action that the verb performs. I think this is like saying that my kitchen chair is wood first. I am describing its origin, its substance, and hence its properties. The fact that I use it as furniture does not alter the fact that in all ways it will behave as a piece of wood.

—
[Edit] All instances of “be” + past participle are passive. “Be” + present participle is continuing present, not passive.

“We don’t argue from usage to grammar.”

Yes we do. Or at least descriptivists like me do.

“I seen you on the street yesterday” – in some dialects the past participle is used alone to indicate past tense.

If you want to follow a prescriptive rule that forbids you from modifying participles with “very”, fair enough. But the fact is that participles sometimes behave as adjectives. How else do you explain the fact that we say and understand things like “I’m very/somewhat/rather annoyed”?
(btw, I’m not annoyed.)

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage on very and the past participle
and participles as adjectives

Grammarians have been talking, and disagreeing, about this since the latter half of the 19th century. MWDEU presents their opinions, the facts of usage, and some reasonable conclusions.

@Jeruba: Go outside, celebrate your birthday, forget from adjectives and present participles, and eat some ice cream.

“Happy birthday” is wished.

@morphail, try a modifier other than “very.”

Pondering this question over the past hour or so has pulled up some refinement of my recollection, which I think has to do with the notion that an intensifier isn’t appropriate to a past participle (still ruminating). This is still uncertain in my mind and I don’t claim authority for it. But I do assert that you chose a special modifier in “very” and can’t generalize from it.

You can certainly modify a past participle. For instance, you can say “I was <adverb> attacked by a tiger.”
I was viciously attacked by a tiger.
I was suddenly attacked by a tiger.
I was often attacked by a tiger.
I was recently attacked by a tiger.
And you can include “very”:
I was very quickly attacked by a tiger.

Nonetheless, I see no basis in any of your argumentation for the assertion that “I am involved” is anything other than passive.

[Edit] Be thou thanked, @gailcalled. But—this is how I entertain myself! This doesn’t look like work, does it?

‘But I do assert that you chose a special modifier in “very” and can’t generalize from it.’

I don’t think I want to generalize. Yes, “very” is special, but the fact that “very” can modify some participles and not others tells us something. I admit that my comments about modification were too broad – now that I’ve read the MWDEU entries again, I should have stuck with “very”.

Did you read the MWDEU entries? They say this much better than I could. There are tests we can use to determine whether a participle has achieved adjective status.
attributive use: She gave me an annoyed look.
predicative use with seem: She seems rather annoyed.
premodification with very: She’s very annoyed.
comparison: She’s growing more/less annoyed by the minute.

A “by” phrase, when the agent is animate, tells us that the participle is still a participle: She was annoyed by the panhandler.

The grammarian Quirk claimed that modification by “very” is “explicit indication” that a participle has achieved adjective status. But what is an adjective to one speaker might still be just a participle to another.

I see no basis in any of your argumentation for the assertion that “I am involved” can be only passive.

Happy birthday!

Is this sentence passive or active?

“I am.”

Neither. It is existential, especially in French.

It’s not passive. In one view, that makes it active by default. I think there’s another view that says that if it can’t be passivized then it is neither active nor passive. “Be” can’t be passivized, so it’s neither.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall. Who’s the fairest of them all?”

“I am.”

Do you guys remember the question? Aren’t we supposed to stay on the topic?

We’re on topic. Is “I am” an active or passive use of “to be” with neither a participle nor an adjectival modifier?

Nor a noun. Elliptical, as in your example.

@Jeruba: Right. I forgot, “I am Spartacus.”

No you aren’t.
I am Spartacus!