Past Perfect Passive is used to talk about actions or events that happened before some moment or another action in the past.
Similar to the past perfect in the active voice, the past perfect passive expresses a previous action or state that began in the past and continued up to another point in the past, and its consequences have implications for that second point in time. In the picture below, this another point in time is marked by ‘X’.
We use Past Perfect Passive with the same meaning as Past Perfect in the active voice except for the fact that Past Perfect Passive makes focus on the effect (or the object) rather than the doer (the subject) of an action. Read more about the uses of Past Perfect here.
To make statements with the Past Perfect Passive, use:
had been + the Past Participle form of the verb
Singular | Plural |
I had been promoted You had been promoted He/she/it had been promoted | We had been promoted You had been promoted They had been promoted |
It doesn’t matter if the subject of your sentence is singular or plural. The structure doesn’t change.
To make a negative Past Perfect Passive structure, just insert ‘not‘ between ‘had’ and ‘been’ (you can also use ‘hadn’t’ instead of ‘had not’).
The structure for asking questions in Past Perfect Passive is:
had + [subject] + been + Past Participle
Here’s a good video from CET Language Department explaining how to use passive voice in Past Perfect:
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