had not been + PAST PARTICIPLE – English Grammar Profiler

The past perfect passive simple negative is a verb tense that is used to describe an action that happened before another action in the past. It is formed by using the auxiliary verb “had” with the past participle of the verb, and the negative word “not”.

In the English Grammar Profile, B2 point 17 in the category of PASSIVES is defined as:

PAST PERFECT passive SIMPLE negative form.

The formula for the past perfect passive simple negative is:

subject + had + ( not | n't ) + been + past participle

A search on iWeb corpus for had _xx been _vvn

gives us the most common past participles ranked in order: SEEN, MADE, GIVEN, USED, PAID, TOLD, and TAKEN. Because ‘seen’ is the most common lexical past participle, we do a search for possible adverbs in various middle positions with it and we believe using adverbs in this structure is so rare that it points to C1 ability at the very least:

had * not been seen

1 HAD PREVIOUSLY NOT BEEN SEEN 9

Peng Shuai had previously not been seen in public 

or heard from directly

 since alleging that former vice-premier Zhang Gaoli

 coerced her into sex several years ago.

people.com

2  HAD REPORTEDLY NOT BEEN SEEN 6
3  HAD HE NOT BEEN SEEN 4 (‘he‘ is not an adverb, but shows how rare inversion is for a question or other grammar)

had _XX * been seen

1 HAD NOT PREVIOUSLY BEEN SEEN 26 2 HAD NOT YET BEEN SEEN 22

3 HADN’T REALLY BEEN SEEN 12

4 HAD NOT EVEN BEEN SEEN 5

Ranked 9 is ‘HAD NOT BEEN INFORMED’