Promise is a very troublesome verb, syntactically speaking.
Most bitransitive communicational verbs, like tell, order, or ask, take infinitive complements with B-Equi from the Indirect Object, thus:
Su told/ordered/asked IO [(for IO) to VP], as in
They told him to prune the peaches.
She ordered him to leave immediately.
I asked her to stop by after church.
These cases are prototype examples of B-Equi, which means that the Indirect Object of the main clause is also understood to be the Subject of the infinitive clause.
They did the telling to him, while he did the pruning. Etc.
With promise, however, the pattern breaks:
Su promised IO [(for Su) to VP], as in
She promised me to leave right after she talked to Bill.
I promised her to take out the garbage.
Here, She did the promising, and she was to do the leaving. In other words, it's the Subject of promise that is understood to be the subject of its infinitive, and not its Indirect Object, as in the prototype cases. This is the pattern for A-Equi, where there is no Indirect Object, as in
- She promised to be home before 11.
- She wanted to be home before 11.
- She tried to be home before 11.
- She managed to be home before 11.
In these A-Equi cases, She is the subject of both the main clause and the infinitive.
It feels like promise is less bitransitive than performative. Performative verbs require an audience, and promise, in particular, requires someone (even if only oneself) to attend to the promise. But that's taken for granted, just like the audiences for say, or swear, or claim, or any other performative verb. The identity of the audience of performative verbs normally need not be expressed in the sentence; this allows promise to be more comfortable with A-Equi and without an indirect object.
Promise also feels more comfortable with a that-complement, when an indirect object is present:
- I promised her that I would trim the magnolias after school tomorrow.
- I promised her to trim the magnolias after school tomorrow.
In a tensed clause, of course, subjects are required and aren't deleted, so no reference problem arises.
Our esteemed professor has in a potentially ephemeral comment above written this fine answer, which I herebelow consign to posterity and the general community pro bono publico:
Yes, it’s a base-level rule. These terms (Su, DO, IO) are called Grammatical Relations and form dependency trees with the predicate; this is a representational practice derived from logic.
Not all languages have syntax that uses these relations, though — there are many ergative structures in the world, and for them “Subject” and “Direct Object” are meaningless terms.
“Indirect Object”, on the other hand, is usually just the receiver.
Best Answer
The premise of the question, namely that "we need a direct object to form a passive sentence" is not correct. Active sentences with prepositional phrases can indeed be converted into passives, such as in the first example:
Google shows plenty of hits with the similar phrase "You are being toyed with".
In fact, all of the sentences listed can, in an exercise in syntax, be converted to the passive as follows:
Whether such constructions are considered acceptable has a lot to do with why we use the passive in the first place. Clearly, the passive allows the speaker or writer to make a certain person or thing the subject of the discourse.
So, the active sentence:
could in theory be converted to:
if we wish to make the school our focus, not the decorators.
No doubt the passive here would still be found questionable by some. And this may also have something to do with the greater acceptability of idiomatic verb + prepositional phrases in the passive. Compare the following two sentences:
The second sentence with its idiomatic use seems much more acceptable.