Grammatical Summary

Stative Passive Constructions Describing Emotional States

A salient type of stative passive is the combination of the verb to be with adjectives that describe an emotional state. There are about three dozen of them in common use. They are derived from verbs and are identical in form to past participles, most of them ending in -ed. But instead of indicating an action, they refer to the experiencing of an emotion. Note these examples:

I was bored.	(= I felt bored.)
I was depressed.	(= I felt depressed.)
I was exhausted.	(= I felt exhausted.)
I was interested.	(= I felt interested.)
I was tired.	(= I felt tired.)
I was relieved.	(= I felt relieved.)
I was satisfied.	(= I felt satisfied.)
I was shocked.	(= I felt shocked.)
I was disgusted.	(= I felt disgusted.)

Instead of an agent by-phrase, these adjectives most often take a range of prepositions to connect them to the cause of the emotion.

Occasionally, however, even some of these constructions may have a true passive interpretation.

In this case, the sentence could have an active counterpart of “Your behavior shocked me.”