Re: Passives - prepositional verbs

Yankee — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 13:35:39 GMT

Hi Peta

I don't know that there is any "official" list of which prepositional verbs can/should be made passive.

As is always the case with passives, however, you should first ask yourself if turning an object into the subject of a sentence (which is always what the passive does) is really justified. Turning the object into the subject puts more focus (or strength) on the original object and relegates the original subject of the sentence to a position of lesser importance.

In the case of your "these caves" sentence, the caves are much more specific than "primitive men" and the caves are obviously a focus of the on-going conversation.

In your tunnel sentence, you wrote "a tunnel", which is very non-specific. I assume the end of the sentence would be something such as "by John" -- i.e. very specific and important to the sentence. Look at a different pair of sentences:

- John built a tunnel.
- A tunnel was built by John.

I would say that the passive would rarely be justified in my example above.

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The following would be a very different situation:

- John Roebling designed the Brooklyn Bridge.
- The Brooklyn Bridge was designed by John Roebling.

You could easily use either the active or the passive sentence above.

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Re: Passives - prepositional verbs