Using passive voice

Passive voice with verbs + prepositions

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Other verbs followed by prepositions

Consider the following example:

The worst-dressed MP according to one list last year was Kenneth Clarke, the Chancellor. He was upbraided for wearing "a suit that looks like it's been slept in". (Bank of English)

Sleep in is not a phrasal verb here. In fact, sleep is normally classified as an intransitive verb, and a suit would not be the object of the verb in the active version of this clause. It would be the object of the preposition in:

He    has slept           in                   his suit.
                verb               preposition        object of preposition

This appears to be an exception to the rule that passives cannot be formed with intransitive verbs. Objects of prepositions can in fact sometimes be used as subjects of passive clauses in this way. This is an area of great variation in modern English. Generally speaking, such passive clauses occur more commonly in informal spoken English than in formal written English. For example, the linguist M.A.K. Halliday cites the following example overheard in a cinema queue:

Look at all these people we've been come in after by.

A passive clause such as this would be unlikely to occur in written English.

Teaching implications

In the case of passives formed from the look after type of phrasal verb, and passives which take the objects of prepositions as subjects, it is probably best to draw students' attention to them as they crop up. Students should also be encouraged to check before using such passive forms themselves. Cobuild English Grammar gives a useful list of phrasal verbs of this type which are often used in the passive . For teachers and advanced students lucky enough to have access to a corpus and a concordancer , this may be an interesting area for research.

Phrasal verbs
Other verbs followed by preposition