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Information about Past Participle

In linguistics, a participle is a non-finite verb form that can be used in compound tenses or voices, or as a modifier. Participles often share properties with other parts of speech, in particular adjectives and nouns.

Participles in Modern English

English verbs have two participles. One, called variously the present, active, imperfect, or progressive participle, is identical in form to the gerund, and indeed the term present participle is sometimes used to include the gerund. The term gerund-participle is also used. The other participle, called variously the past, passive, or perfect participle, is usually identical to the verb's preterite (past tense) form, though in irregular verbs the two usually differ. Examples of participle formation include:

Verb		Preterite
(past)		Past
Participle		Present
Participle		Regular/
Irregular
talktalkedtalkingregular
hirehiredhiring
dodiddonedoingirregular
saysaidsaying
eatateeateneating
writewrotewrittenwriting
beatbeatbeatenbeating
singsangsungsinging


The present participle in English is active. It has the following uses:
  • forming the progressive aspect: Jim was sleeping.
  • modifying a noun: Let sleeping dogs lie.
  • modifying a verb or sentence: Broadly speaking, the project was successful.
The present participle in English has the same form as the gerund, which however is a noun. Thus the word sleeping in Your job description does not include sleeping past noon is not a present participle.

The past participle has both active and passive uses:
  • forming the perfect aspect: The chicken has eaten.
  • forming the passive voice: The chicken was eaten.
  • modifying a noun, active sense (certain intransitive verbs only): our fallen comrades
  • modifying a noun, passive sense: the attached files
  • modifying a verb or sentence, passive sense: Seen from this perspective, there is no easy solution.
As noun-modifiers, participles usually precede the noun (like adjectives), but in many cases they can or must follow it:
  • Please bring all the documents required.
  • The difficulties encountered were nearly insurmountable.

Participles in other languages

Latin

Compared with English, Latin has an additional future tense participle:
  • present active participle: educāns "teaching"
  • perfect passive participle: educatus "(having been) taught"
  • future active participle: educātūrus "about to teach"
  • future passive participle: educāndus "(necessary) to be taught"
Latin participles decline like adjectives.

Old English

  • In Old English, present participles ended in -ende or -iende depending on verb class. In Middle English, various forms were used in different regions: -ende (SW, SE, Midlands), -inde (SW, SE), -and (N), -inge (SE). This latter form eventually fell together with the suffix -ing, used to form verbal nouns.
  • Past participles were marked with a ge- prefix, as is done today in Dutch and High German.

Lithuanian

Among Indo-European languages, Lithuanian language is unique for having thirteen different participial forms of the verb, that can be grouped into five when accounting for inflection by tense. Some of these are also inflected by gender and case. For example, the verb eiti ("to go, to walk") has the active participle form einąs/einantis ("going, walking", present tense), the passive participle form einamas ("being walked", present tense), the adverbial participle einant ("while it is being walked"), the semi-participle eidamas ("while [he is/was] going, walking") and the participle of necessity eitinas ("that which needs to be walked"). The first three of those five are inflected by tense, while the active, passive and the semi- participles are inflected by gender and the active, passive and necessity ones are inflected by case.

Esperanto

Esperanto has a full range of regular and symmetric passive and active participles in three tenses: past, present and future. The vowels i, a, and o show past, present, and future tenses respectively (a system also used in the finite verb tenses), followed by nt for active participles and t for passives, plus a grammatical ending. Thus we have for example (the -a ending is the adjective ending), from skribi, "to write":
  • Past active participle: skribinta "having written"
  • Present active participle: skribanta "writing"
  • Future active participle: skribonta "about to write"
  • Past passive participle: skribita "written"
  • Present passive participle: skribata "being written"
  • Future passive participle: skribota "about to be written", or to be written at some future time
Esperanto has other suffixes which take over some of the more metaphorical uses of, for example, the Latin future passive participle, such as the meaning of worthiness or necessity.

Interlingua

In Interlingua, active participles end in -nte. For example, dansa ("dances") gives dansante ("dancing"). Passive participles end in -te: dansate ("danced"). In Interlingua, like in English, the perfect aspect is formed using a form of the verb haber ("to have") plus the passive participle; for example, haber dansate is "to have danced".

Further information: Interlingua grammar

French

There are two basic participles:
  • Present participle: formed with the verb root + ant, hence marchant "walking", étant "being"
  • Past participle: formation varies according to verb group, such that we have marché "walked", été "been", vendu "sold", mis "placed", and fait "done". May require agreement.
The French present participle, however, is not used to mark the continuous aspect as it is in English.

Compound participles are possible:
  • Present perfect participle: ayant appelé "having called", étant mort "having died"
  • Passive perfect participle: étant vendu "being sold, having been sold"

Spanish

In Spanish, the present participle (el gerundio; also called the "gerund" or "gerundive") of a verb is generally formed with one of the suffixes -ando, -iendo; the past participle (el participio) is generally formed with one of the suffixes -ado, -ido.

Traditionally, Spanish grammar has regarded the present participle not as an adjective, but as an adverb, and it does not change form to agree with any noun in gender or number. Nonetheless, it is used in much the same ways as the (adjective) present participle in English; for example, Spanish's equivalent of English's progressive aspect (e.g., to be doing) is formed with a combination of the verb estar (to be in a transient sense) and the present participle of the main verb (e.g., estar haciendo).

By contrast, the past participle is considered an adjective, and agrees with a noun in gender and number, except when used to express the perfect aspect (e.g., to have done, which in Spanish is haber hecho).

Finnish

Verb: tehdä (to do)

Present active: tekevä
Present passive: tehtävä
Past active: tehnyt
Past passive: tehty
Agent participle (passive): tekemä (done by...)

Kinds of participles in various languages

Adverbial and adjectival

In some languages, a distinction between adverbial participle and adjectival participle can be made. Among these is Esperanto. See and in Russian grammar, or and in Hungarian grammar. Also many Eskimo languages make such a distinction, see for details e.g. the sophisticated participle system of Sireniki Eskimo.

See also

References

  • Participles from the American Heritage Book of English Usage (1996).
For the journal, see .
Linguistics is the scientific study of language, which can be theoretical or applied. Someone who engages in this study is called a linguist.
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In linguistics, a non-finite verb (or a verbal) is a verb form that is not limited by a subject; and more generally, it is not fully inflected by categories that are marked inflectionally in language, such as tense, aspect, mood, number, gender, and person.
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verb is a word belonging to the part of speech that usually denotes an action (bring, read), an occurrence (decompose, glitter), or a state of being (exist, stand).
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Grammatical tense is a way languages express the time at which an event described by a sentence occurs. In English, this is a property of a verb form, and expresses only time-related information.
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In grammar, the voice of a verb describes the relationship between the action (or state) that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its arguments (subject, object, etc.). When the subject is the agent or actor of the verb, the verb is in the active voice.
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In grammar, a modifier (or qualifier) is a word or sentence element that limits or qualifies another word, a phrase, or a clause. In English, there are two kinds of modifiers: adjectives, which modify nouns and pronouns, and adverbs
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    In grammar, an adjective is a word whose main syntactic role is to modify a noun or pronoun (called the adjective's subject), giving more information about what the noun or pronoun refers to.
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    Examples
    A proper or common noun can co-occur with an article or an attributive adjective. Verbs and adjectives can't. As usual, a `*' in front of an example means that this example is ungrammatical.
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    English}}} 
    Writing system: Latin (English variant) 
    Official status
    Official language of: 53 countries
    Regulated by: no official regulation
    Language codes
    ISO 639-1: en
    ISO 639-2: eng
    ISO 639-3: eng  
    ..... Click the link for more information.
    In linguistics, “gerund” is a term used to refer to various non-finite verb forms in various languages:
    • As applied to English, it refers to what might be called a verb's action noun, which is one of the uses of the -ing form.

    ..... Click the link for more information.
    preterite (also praeterite, in American English also preterit, simple past, or past historic) is the grammatical tense expressing actions which took place in the past. It is similar to the aorist in languages such as Greek.
    ..... Click the link for more information.
    The continuous and progressive aspects are grammatical aspects that express incomplete action in progress at a specific time: they are non-habitual, imperfective aspects.
    ..... Click the link for more information.
    In linguistics, “gerund” is a term used to refer to various non-finite verb forms in various languages:
    • As applied to English, it refers to what might be called a verb's action noun, which is one of the uses of the -ing form.

    ..... Click the link for more information.
    The perfect aspect is a grammatical aspect that refers to a state resulting from a previous action (also described as a previous action with relevance to a particular time, or a previous action viewed from the perspective of a later time).
    ..... Click the link for more information.
    In grammar, the voice of a verb describes the relationship between the action (or state) that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its arguments (subject, object, etc.). When the subject is the agent or actor of the verb, the verb is in the active voice.
    ..... Click the link for more information.
    intransitive verb is a verb that does have a subject and does not have an object. In more technical terms, an intransitive verb has only one argument (its subject), and hence has a valency of one.
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      In grammar, an adjective is a word whose main syntactic role is to modify a noun or pronoun (called the adjective's subject), giving more information about what the noun or pronoun refers to.
      ..... Click the link for more information.
      Latin}}} 
      Official status
      Official language of: Vatican City
      Used for official purposes, but not spoken in everyday speech
      Regulated by: Opus Fundatum Latinitas
      Roman Catholic Church
      Language codes
      ISO 639-1: la
      ISO 639-2: lat
      ..... Click the link for more information.
      In linguistics, a future tense is a verb form that marks the event described by a verb as not having happened yet, but expected to in the future.

      Future tense in English

      In English, as in most Germanic languages, there is no simple future tense.
      ..... Click the link for more information.
        In grammar, an adjective is a word whose main syntactic role is to modify a noun or pronoun (called the adjective's subject), giving more information about what the noun or pronoun refers to.
        ..... Click the link for more information.
        Old English/Anglo-Saxon}}}
        Language codes
        ISO 639-1: none
        ISO 639-2: ang
        ISO 639-3: ang Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon[1], Englisc
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        Middle English}}}
        Language codes
        ISO 639-1: none
        ISO 639-2: enm
        ISO 639-3: enm

        Middle English is the name given by historical linguistics to the diverse forms of the English language spoken between the Norman invasion of 1066
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        The High German languages are a subdivision of the West Germanic Languages     
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        Lithuanian (lietuvių kalba) is the official state language of the Republic of Lithuania, spoken by about 4 million native speakers.

        History


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        Esperanto}}} 
        Category (sources): vocabulary from Romance and Germanic languages; phonology from Slavic languages 
        Regulated by: Akademio de Esperanto
        Language codes
        ISO 639-1: eo
        ISO 639-2: epo
        ISO 639-3: epo
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        Interlingua is an international auxiliary language (IAL) published in 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). It is the most widely used naturalistic auxiliary language.
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        grammar of Interlingua, an international auxiliary language first publicized by IALA. It follows the usage of the original grammar text (Gode & Blair, 1951), which is accepted today but regarded as conservative. For modern trends, see Variants.
        ..... Click the link for more information.
        The continuous and progressive aspects are grammatical aspects that express incomplete action in progress at a specific time: they are non-habitual, imperfective aspects.
        ..... Click the link for more information.
        The continuous and progressive aspects are grammatical aspects that express incomplete action in progress at a specific time: they are non-habitual, imperfective aspects.
        ..... Click the link for more information.
        The perfect aspect is a grammatical aspect that refers to a state resulting from a previous action (also described as a previous action with relevance to a particular time, or a previous action viewed from the perspective of a later time).
        ..... Click the link for more information.


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