Present Participle

7 Key excerpts on "Present Participle"

• 

  eBook - PDF

  Essential Grammar for Today's Writers, Students, and Teachers

  • 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.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar

  Fourth Edition

  • William D. Mounce(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Zondervan Academic

    (Publisher)

  You have now learned the majority of the grammar of participles. It remains only to learn their forms, and you already know all their case endings from your study of adjectives. If you are comfortable with the paradigm of πᾶς (page 425), the forms of participles will be easy.

  Summary

  1. A participle is a verbal adjective, sharing characteristics of both a verb and an adjective.
  2. As a verb, it has tense (present, aorist, perfect) and voice (active, middle, passive).8
  3. As an adjective, it agrees with the word it modifies in case, number, and gender.
  4. A participle can be adverbial, modifying a verbal form (always anarthrous), or adjectival (usually articular).
  5. Participles do not indicate absolute time but rather aspect.
  6. The imperfective participle is built on the present tense stem and describes a continuous action.
  7. The perfective participle is built on the unaugmented aorist tense stem and describes an undefined action.
  8. The combinative participle is built on the perfect tense stem and describes a completed action with ongoing effects.

  Notes

  1

  More accurately stated, “-ing” is added to form the active participle. “-ed” is added to form the passive participle. “Moved by the sermon, they all began to cry.”

  2

  There are 6,658 participles in the New Testament.

  3

  There also is a participle that is built on the future tense stem, but it occurs only twelve times in the New Testament. See Advanced Information in chapter 28.

  4

  I use the nominative plural forms since they show the unmodified participle morpheme.

  5

  For those of you learning depondency: If the verb is deponent in a certain tense, its corresponding participle will be deponent. The participle ἐρχόμενοι would be deponent because ἔρχομαι, the tense stem on which it is built, is deponent.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Many Faces of English -ing

  • Xin Sennrich(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Mustanoja 1960 : 573).

  The source structure for Present Participle is illustrated in (2). Byrnendum is a deverbal form but functions as an adjective premodifying the noun ofne. In agreement with its head, it takes the adjectival dative singular ending in -um (De Smet 2014 : 225).

  (2)

  Ðas	þri	cnihtas	het	se	cyning	awurpan	into
  the	three	knights	commanded	the	king	throw	into

  byrnendum	ofne
  burning.DAT	oven.DAT

  ‘The king ordered those three knights to be thrown into a burning oven’ (c1000, OED)

  A major distinctive feature of Present Participles is their nature as being either verbal or adjectival (Callaway 1901 : 141–142). Even though this proposed dichotomy in nature may be said to be inherent in participles (compare the shining sun (adjectival) and the sun, shining through trees, lighted our path (verbal) (Callaway 1901 : 142)), a process of restriction can be generated by continual adjectival use of a form, resulting in the participle becoming an adjective proper (Callaway 1901 : 142). This development can be seen in Older Scots lufand ‘lovingly, friendly’ or plesand ‘pleasant, agreeable’, which are both listed as “(participial) adjective” in DOST/DSL (2004). In addition, Callaway’s treatment of the appositive participles in Anglo-Saxon (Callaway 1901 ) and the absolute participles in Anglo-Saxon (Callaway 1889 ) are valuable in seeing that Present Participles are considered in their original state as being clearly separated from gerunds.

  In Older Scots, there also exists a distinction between gerunds and Present Participles. Gerunds end in -ing, whereas Present Participles end in -and. In the course of the Modern Scots period, this distinction in ending has been dying out. MacQueen concludes from her study of official records written in the first half of the eighteenth century that “the -and of the Present Participle was [. . .] practically obsolete in 1700” (MacQueen 1957 : 141). The loss of this distinction has been explained in The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland (Murray 1873 : 210) “In the sixteenth century, the dialect of Central Scotland, and the literary Middle Scots founded upon it, lost the distinction between the participle and gerund, apparently on accounts of the final consonants becoming mute, and the vowels being then confounded, so that both forms were written -ing, -in

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Event Arguments: Foundations and Applications

  • Claudia Maienborn, Angelika Wöllstein, Claudia Maienborn, Angelika Wöllstein(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  In particular older speakers of Scots still differentiate the Present Participle and the gerund (verbal noun). In older Scots the Present Participle was written /an(d)/ and the gerund /in/. These pronunciations are still used. (32) a. Present Participle: He wis aye stravaigan aboot. He was always roaming around, b. Gerund: He's fond ο stravaigin aboot. He likes roaming around. Hence we have evidence coming from two areas that the gerund -ing is a nominal head. Since, however, gerunds do refer to ongoing events and allow adverbial modification, we do have evidence for the presence of AspectP within the verbal gerund. (33) illustrates the structure assumed for verbal gerunds: Table 2 relates the functional material contained in (33) to the properties associated with verbal gerunds: Gerund types, the Present Participle and patterns of derivation 149 Properties verbal gerund Functional Structure article * D contains's', no NumbP adjectival modification * No NumbP adverbial modification V AspectP overt subject ^ (gen) SpecJDP movement from Spec, vP accusative object V ν [+extemal argument] Table2 It appears to be the case that a crucial difference between the two gerund types concerns the fact that nominal gerunds contain number, while verbal gerunds lack number. Moreover, the latter contain Aspect, while the former lack Aspect. Note here that while pluralization is not possible for the verbal gerund, it is possible for the nominal one, e.g. *Johrt's readings the book vs. John's readings of the book. This analysis captures the different distribution and interpretation of the nominal and the participle in English. What has not been answered thus far is the propositional reading related with the verbal gerund. The suggestion made in Chomsky (1970) that gerunds con-tain a sentence level, i.e. a TP, cannot be maintained in view of the fact that modal and speaker oriented adverbials cannot be contained within the verbal gerund.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Germanic Language Histories 'from Below' (1700-2000)

  • Stephan Elspaß, Nils Langer, Joachim Scharloth, Wim Vandenbussche, Stephan Elspaß, Nils Langer, Joachim Scharloth, Wim Vandenbussche(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  In what follows I argue that there were certain trends in English which supported the development of Present Participle converbs, while there were no corresponding trends in Danish and Norwegian (or Dano-Norwegian). 3.2.1 English As mentioned earlier (cf. footnote 1), in Middle English the participle suffix changed from -ende to -ing. This turned the English -ing suffix into a highly poly-functional form, with nominal, adjectival, adverbial, prepositional, and verbal uses. Most important to our purposes here is the fact that -ing participles were increasingly used with verb-like functions and properties. Three different categories are of interest here: 1) the progressive, 2) the gerund, and 3) converbs (and other appositive participles, cf. footnote 2). Examples of gerunds are given in (11) below, while (12) provides examples of progressives. (11a) She regretted having told him the truth (direct object) (lib) Telling him the truth was the only decent thing to do (subject) (11c) In aiming for such a theory, I shall begin with a number of interrelated assumptions (from Kortmann 1995: 200) (object of a preposition, adverbial at a higher level) (12a) She was telling him the truth. (12b) I have been aiming for such a theory. The structures under discussion here have very different functions at the sentence level. Thus, while the progressive is verbal, the gerund is nominal and the converb clause adverbial. However, the relevant structures are syntactically rather similar in the sense that they may all take verbal complementation. Interestingly, all these categories experienced a huge growth in frequency at approx. the same time, i.e. from the 15th and 16th century onwards (Dennis 1940; Strang 1982; Houston 1989: 176ff.; Elsness 1993: 13; Fanego 1996: 118ff.). Given the shared properties of these various -ing categories, viz.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Hammer's German Grammar and Usage

  • Martin Durrell(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Participial clauses are restricted to formal written registers. In particular, those with Present Participles can sound stilted and they are used much less frequently than clauses with ‘ing’-forms in English. In practice, English learners are best advised to avoid them entirely in German and use instead one of the alternatives detailed in 11.6 . (a) Clauses with the Present Participle The Present Participle used in a non-finite clause indicates an action taking place at the same time as that of the finite verb in the main clause: Den Schildern folgend , fanden sie das Krankenhaus ( Walser ) Ich putzte auf dem Brett stehend das Fenster von außen ( Spiegel ) eine ständige Verbesserung des Automobils nach den Möglichkeiten der Zeit, doch zugleich immer aufbauend auf das Erreichte ( Mercedes advert ) Following the signs, they found the hospital I was cleaning the window from the outside, standing on the plank a continuous improvement of the car according to the possibilities of the time, but at the same time always building on what has been achieved (b) Clauses with the past participle The meaning of the past participle in a non-finite clause differs according to the type of verb . (i) With intransitive verbs , the past participle has an active (i.e. not passive) sense, and refers to an action which has taken place before that indicated by the finite verb in the main clause: Der neue Lehrer, in Freiburg angekommen , suchte das Humboldt-Gymnasium auf Having arrived in Freiburg, the new teacher went to the Humboldt Secondary School (ii) With transitive verbs , the past participle has the force of a passive .

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Participles

  A Typological Study

  • Ksenia Shagal(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  In the present chapter, I have given a brief overview of traditional definitions of participles. I have shown that many of these definitions appear to be extremely broad, which presumably can be explained by the multifunctionality of the forms used for adnominal modification, especially in languages whose description most influenced the European linguistic tradition. I have further shown that narrower definitions, which take the notion of adjective as a starting point, also turn out to be fairly problematic. Although these work perfectly for the languages with primary adjectives, they fail to include some relevant verb forms in languages that lack them, for instance in languages with verb-like adjectives, such as West Greenlandic, Seri, and Garo.

  As an alternative, I have proposed to create a comparative concept, which would allow to study the similarities and differences of the forms that are functionally and structurally close to each other in all kinds of typologically diverse languages. The proposed concept of participle is based on the following features of the form:

  • – the ability to introduce a headed relative clause, while being itself the locus of subordination marking and conveying no additional meaning;
  • –
    pertaining to the verbal paradigm, i.e. being formed by morphological rather than syntactic means, and at the same time demonstrating enough regularity and generality to qualify as inflection rather than derivation;
  • – being deranked, i.e. demonstrating some degree of morphosyntactic deviation from the prototypical predicate of an independent sentence in a given language.

  I have further shown that typologically it is extremely common that verb forms used for adnominal modification, i.e. qualifying as participles in this study, also function as arguments, and therefore receive the label “nominalization” in the descriptions of individual languages. I argue that although in an in-depth analysis of a particular language it may be valuable to determine the primary function of the forms demonstrating such syncretism, for a typological study like this one it is more reasonable to consider these forms as participial and hence investigate them together with the other participial forms. However, I do exclude infinitival relative clauses from my study, because of the considerable semantic augmentation typically associated with them.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book