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Is it?

The car was stolen last night.

or

The car has been stolen last night.

Also which of the following endings is correct?

She bought a little cup which had been filled with butter/has been filled with butter/was filled with butter.

My teacher really made the passive voice complicated for me, especially the past perfect and present perfect parts. I'm really confused, I would appreciate some help.

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  • For the stolen car the first one is correct. For the second, all three are correct— with different implications, of course.
    – user405662
    Commented Dec 24, 2020 at 11:08
  • 1
    This should really be two separate questions.
    – KillingTime
    Commented Dec 24, 2020 at 11:12
  • I'm close-voting; more basic questions should be asked on ELL. However (1) 'The car has been stolen' does not accept temporal markers such as 'last night', 'on Thursday', 'when we were in Elbonia'. Only 'was stolen last night' is acceptable here. (2) All three are acceptable here, though (a) is a sentence unlikely to be met with and (b) very unlikely. (c) (meaning the cup was full of butter when bought) is doubtless what your teacher sees as the (only) correct answer.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Dec 24, 2020 at 11:51

1 Answer 1

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It's not correct grammatically to say Someone has stolen my car last night.

We use the past simple tense instead of the present perfect tense when talking about such occurences happening in the (very) recent past.

And equivalently, you must say, in the passive voice this: My car was stolen( not has been stolen) last night.

She bought a little cup—

which had been filled with butter : this means someone, perhaps a lavish shopkeeper, had filled the cup with butter. Here the doer of the action is made more prominent than the action itself.

has been filled with butter.: this means someone filled the cup with butter after she had bought it. In other words, it wasn't already filled with butter.

was filled with butter.: this conveys the same idea as 1,only that here there is no emphasis on the doer of the action (butter-filling). It's the action itself that is made more prominent here.

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  • It's not someone has stolen my car It's The car -or A car I may not remember correctly- was stolen last night it was from a newspaper article in my book.
    – IopsI
    Commented Dec 24, 2020 at 11:40
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    Thank you for the explanation, I didn't know there was that kind of meaning difference about has been :)
    – IopsI
    Commented Dec 24, 2020 at 11:42

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