Languages & Linguistics
Participial Phrase
A participial phrase is a group of words consisting of a participle (a verb form used as an adjective) and any accompanying modifiers or complements. It functions as an adjective, modifying a noun or pronoun in a sentence. Participial phrases can add descriptive detail and provide additional information about the subject of a sentence.
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- Nancy M. Sullivan(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
111 Verbals Participles The second verbal that we examine in this chapter is the participle. Participles are adjectives, so we will not use the term “participle adjective”—it is redundant. Below, we will examine participles and participle phrases, their placement in sentences, their punctuation, and their possible confusion with gerunds. At the beginning of the chapter, Table 4.1 showed that participles have two forms: present participle, Verb + ing, e.g., “learning,” “walking,” “talking” “speaking”—and past participle, Verb + en, e.g., “learned,” “walked,” “talked,” “spoken.” (Ved is used for past tense verbs.) We will shorten these further for our discussion: Ving for present participle forms and Ven for past participle forms. Below are more examples of Ving and Ven forms: Present Participle Form (Ving) Past Participle Form (Ven) eating eaten interesting interested studying studied finding found In previous chapters, we learned that adjectives must always modify a noun or pronoun; they can change, expand, qualify, add to, or enrich the concepts of the nouns or pronouns they modify. That’s what participles do. It helps to think of them as having been reincarnated from their past lives as verbs, like gerunds; however, parti- ciples function as adjectives (whereas gerunds function as nouns). As mentioned above, participles can have two forms, Ving and Ven. Below are examples of both forms with the participles underlined and arrows pointing to the nouns that they modify. Ving Participles: I think Cantonese is an interesting language. The Cantonese language is interesting. The motivating factor was that she planned to live in Hong Kong. Many of our founding fathers spoke two or three languages. Ven Participles: She gave me a worried look during our Hindi exam. 112 Verbals She was very worried. The motivated student talked freely to others to practice the language.
eBook - ePubParticiples
A Typological Study
- Ksenia Shagal(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
2 Defining participles2.1 Introduction
Although the label “participle” is widely used in the linguistic literature, the term is far from well-defined. For a typological study like this one, however, providing a precise definition of the object of investigation is of utmost importance. The goal of the present chapter is to develop such a definition, against a background of potential problems in defining the category for cross-linguistic comparison.I will start by presenting several traditional definitions of participles and the conceptions they are based upon. I will also show why these definitions appear to be problematic for a wide-scale typological study. This discussion constitutes the topic of Section 2.2 . As an alternative to existing definitions, in Section 2.3 I will propose a cross-linguistically applicable comparative concept of participle based on several other comparative concepts, namely the concepts of relative clause (Section 2.3.1 ), verb form (Section 2.3.2 ), and deranking (Section 2.3.3 ). Section 2.4 is specifically devoted to participle/nominalization syncretism, a very widespread phenomenon in the languages of the world, which has been pointed out in many studies, such as DeLancey (2002) , Comrie and Thompson (2007), Genetti et al. (2008) , and others. Finally, in Section 2.5 , I summarize the main points discussed in this chapter.2.2 Critique of the traditional definitions
Most linguistic dictionaries and encyclopedias give quite vague definitions of participles, which often cover all non-finite forms, as in (6), sometimes with the exception of infinitives, as in (7):(6) A traditional term for a non-finite form of the verb. (Hartmann and Stork 1972: 165) (7) A traditional grammatical term referring to a word derived from a verb and used as an adjective, as in a laughing face. … In linguistics the term is generally restricted to the non-finite forms of verbs other than the infinitive. (Crystal 2003 
eBook - PDF- Ewald Lang, Claudia Maienborn, Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen, Ewald Lang, Claudia Maienborn, Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
with a few flowers decorated, looks the room much more friendly 'Decorated with a few flowers, the room looks much more friendly.' In the examples (l)-(3), we are dealing with modifiers used attributively which agree with the nominal head of the modificandum in gender, number and case. In (4)-(6), there is no morphologically indicated relation between the modifier and the modificandum. I regard these participle constructions as adverbial modifiers, which can be paraphrased as adverbial sentences. In many languages, there are special morphemes marking the adverbial form of the verb, the so-called adverbial participles (Haspelmath 1995; König 1995; Hengeveld 1998; V. P. Nedjalkov 1995; I.V. Nedjalkov 1995, 1998; Rüzicka 1978, 1982; Kortmann 1995). I will leave aside the characterization of participle constructions as sec-ondary predicates. Further investigation must clarify whether there is a sharp delimitation between adverbial participle constructions and depictive secondary predicates. German participle II constructions as adjuncts 629 The main concern of this paper will be the division of labour between mor-phology, syntax and semantics. The particular questions to be raised are the following: - Which morphosyntactic features characterize German participles Π? - Which configurations and operations are involved in capturing the mor-phosyntactic and semantic polyfunctionality of participles Π? - How do participle Π constructions get their status as attributive and ad-verbial modifiers? 2. The framework Within a minimalist framework of sound-meaning correlation the analysis follows a lexicalist conception of morphology (Wunderlich 1997c) and the differentiation of Semantic Form (SF) and Conceptual Structure (Bierwisch 1987, 1997; Lang 1987, 1990, 1994; Dölling 1997, this volume; Maienborn 1997, this volume). A strict distinction is made between morphological marking and seman-tic interpretation of morphological forms.
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