[Grammar] "fall" in the passive

[Khalid Almohammed]

May the verb " fall" comes in passive
form or not ?
e.g
this wallet was fallen on the road .;-)

 

[teechar]

Hello Khalid, and welcome to the forum.

[STRIKE]May[/STRIKE] Can the verb "fall" [STRIKE]comes[/STRIKE] be in the passive voice?
[STRIKE] form or not ?
[/STRIKE]E.g.,
This wallet was fallen on the road .;-)

No, it can't. It is an intransitive verb.
Say: this wallet fell on the road.

 

[andrewg927]

In some cases like "fallen soldiers" but not your example.

 

[teechar]

In some cases like "fallen soldiers" but not your example.

That's incorrect. The "fallen" in "fallen soldiers" is an adjective.

 

[Tdol]

I don't see a way to turn that into a genuinely passive sentence sentence like [strike]The soldiers were fallen[/strike].

 

[Phaedrus]

No, it can't. It is an intransitive verb.

Of course, sometimes we can form passives with intransitive verbs when followed by a prepositional phrase, the subject of the passive construction being the object of the preposition in the active. This is known as the "prepositional passive." I totally agree that we can't change This wallet fell on the road to *The road was fallen on by this wallet, which I find ungrammatical (why, I'm not exactly sure), but it occurred to me that it might work in a case with fall from. When I tried Googling has been fallen from, I encountered a book on the prepositional passive which lists a number of possible prepositional passive sentences with fallen, including fallen on:

This dangerous roof has been fallen from by a number of people.
She was accustomed to being fallen for by every man she met.
This ditch is fallen into at least once a day.
If scissors are fallen on, they can cause a deep puncture wound.

https://books.google.com/books?id=x...AA#v=onepage&q="has been fallen from"&f=false

I'm not trying to unduly complicate this discussion, but lately the passive is my thing and I find this interesting.

 

[andrewg927]

Phaedrus, you raised a very good point. Those sentences are all grammatical though they are a little awkward in their passive voice.