THE PASSIVE CAUSATIVE

The passive causative is an English grammatical structure that we use to express that someone has done something for or to us. For example, if we have gone to the hairdresser's, we don't say "I cut my hair", because we haven't cut it ourselves, but a professional has done it; so we would use a passive causative.

I had my hair cut.

The "passive causative" is nothing more than the use of causative verbs in the passive form. 

If the passive shifts the focus from the subject to the object and the causative indicates that someone asks or instructs someone to do something, the combination of the two is, in essence someone instructing someone to do something. 

Example:

Passive: the car was fixed by the mechanic. 

Causative: he had the mechanic fix his car.

Passive Causative: he had his car fixed by the mechanic. 

In the examples above, the final effect of the sentences is very convoluted and does not look natural except in certain contexts. This is because in the passive we do not usually indicate who performs the action, since we normally use it precisely to hide this information. Let's see, then, how to form this structure in a more natural way.

Starting from this sentence:

       The nurse took my temperature. 

We form the causative:

       I had the nurse take my temperature. 

And now we just have to pass the verb to passive as usual, putting the object in the place of the subject:

      I had my temperature taken.