The present participle

The Participle

The participle is a term applied to adjectival forms of verbs. It is a form that ‘participates’ in the features of the verb (e.g. The girl is sitting there) and of the adjective (e.g. The girl sitting here). There are two types of participle: the present participle and the past participle.

The term present participle may be misleading since the participle does not express tense distinctions. It is a traditional term, originally applied to adjectival forms of verbs in Ancient Greece which were inflected for tense, aspect, and case. It was borrowed from Greek grammar through Latin grammar and uncritically applied to English verbal forms which had an adjective-like use.

Participle I (present participle) is fully homonymous with the gerund: it is also an ‘ing-form’ (or, rather, four ‘ing-forms’, cf.: writing, being written, having written, having been written). But its semantics is different: it denotes processual quality, combining verbal features with features of the adjective and the adverb; participle I can be characterized as a phenomenon of hybrid processual-qualifying nature, intermediary between the verb and the adjective/adverb.

Like the verb, it combines with the object (e.g. Entering the room, I was dazzled by the bright light), the adjunct (e.g. He came in laughing loudly); like the verb, it participates in the formation of the verbal predicate (e.g. Lucy is writing now).

Like the adjective, the present participle can be used as an attribute – generally as a postposed attribute, e.g. The man talking to John is my boss.

As to its temporal meaning, the present participle expresses a process simultaneous with or prior to the process of the finite verb: it may denote present, past, and future. Consider: I see/saw/ will see a child crying in the street. vs. Having heard the noise, we stopped talking.

The absolute homonymy of the gerund and participle I has made some linguists, among them American descriptivists, the Russian linguists V. Y.Plotkin, L. S. Barkhudarov, and some others, treat them not as two different verbids, but as generalized cases of substantive and qualitative functioning of one and the same “ing-form” verbid. Particularly disputable is the status of the semi-predicative construction, traditionally defined as the “half-gerund” construction, in which the semantics of the “ing-form” is neither clearly processual-substantive nor processual-qualifying and it is combined with the noun in the common case form, e.g.: I remember the boy singing in the backyard.

Like any other verbid, participle I can form semi-predicative constructions if it is combined with the noun or the pronoun denoting the subject of the action; for example, complex object with participle I, e.g.: I saw her entering the room; complex subject with participle I (the passive transformation of the complex object constructions), e.g.: She was seen entering the room. In addition, participle I can form a detached semi-predicative construction, known as the absolute participial construction, which does not intersect in any of its components with the primary sentence part, e.g.: The weather being fine, we decided to take a walk; I won’t speak with him staring at me like that.

In complex object and complex subject constructions the difference between the infinitive and participle I lies in the aspective presentation of the process: participle I presents the process as developing, cf.: I often heard her sing in the backyard. – I hear her singing in the backyard.

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