THE Concise Oxford English Dictionary (2004) defines a participle as “a word formed from a verb (e.g. going, gone, being, been) and used as an adjective or noun (as in burnt toast, good breeding) or used to make compound verb forms (is going, has been).”
This form of the verb on its own does not specify person (first person/second person/third person) or number (singular/plural) or even tense (present/past/ future, or simple/perfect, etc). The above condensed account does not adequately show up the many noteworthy aspects of participles. Permit me to elaborate.
Participles and inflections compared. Participles are somewhat like inflections of verbs in Latin. A set of inflections is tagged onto the stem of a verb (a recognisable fragment of the verb, indicated below in boldface) to show tense, mood, person, number, case, and gender. As a simple example, take the word amo “I love”. The verb has the stem am-, and the different forms of the verb, together with their meanings, are as follows: amo “I love, I am loving”, amas “you (singular) love, you (singular) are loving”, amat ”he/she/it loves, he/she/it is loving”; amamus “we love, we are loving”, amatis “you (plural) love, you (plural) are loving”, amant ”they love, they are loving”.
The above verb forms, with their corresponding inflections, are for the simple present tense. There are other sets of inflections for the past tense (or imperfect tense), the future tense, the present perfect tense, the past perfect tense (of pluperfect tense) and the future perfect tense – all in the indicative mood. Then there are inflections for the subjunctive mood and the imperative mood, and also for the passive voice (as opposed to the active voice above). Hold on! That’s not all. The verb amo is a verb of the first conjugation – and there are, in all, four conjugations of verbs. Irregular verb forms add to the variety and complexity of Latin verb forms. Phew!
The English verb forms are very much less complex. All the necessary verb forms can be derived from the base verb, its past tense, and its past participle (e.g. walk-walked-walked, write-wrote-written) as well as from the present and the past participles. The present and the past participles may be deemed as partial verbs, which are to be preceded by auxiliary verbs to form the continuous tenses and the perfect tenses, respectively.
The present participle. The present participle is formed from a base verb by tagging on the inflection
-ing (e.g. walk > walking, write > writing). It is complemented by the appropriate auxiliary verb to form the continuous tenses, viz. the present continuous tense (am/is/are walking), the past continuous tense (was/were walking), and the future continuous tense (shall/will be walking).
The past participle. Dictionaries usually enter verbs under a head word, which is the base form of the verb, followed by its past tense and its past participle. From the latter are derived, with the complement of the appropriate auxiliary verbs, the present perfect tense (has/have walked), the past perfect tense (had walked), and the future perfect tense (shall/will have walked). With a transitive verb, additional forms in the passive voice can be derived (is/are written, was/were written, shall/will be written).
Quirks in the pronunciation and/or spelling of participles. The present and the past participles of some verbs have the same form and the same pronunciation as the base verb (e.g. hit-hit-hit, let-let-let) – but read-read-read is pronounced as /reed-red-red/.
Some verbs have variant forms for the present and the past participles, but the variants are used in specific contexts and even with different pronunciations. With bless-blessed/blest-blessed/blest, the past participle blessed used as an adjective in the predicative is pronounced with one syllable (she was blessed with good looks); used as an attributive adjective, the past participle is pronounced with two syllables (the blessed ground trod by the prophet).
Some verbs have two forms for the past participle. Which of the two is used depends on the context. For example, we may speak of a bent ruler – but not bent knee (he went down on bended knee to propose to his long-time girlfriend). Other examples: (1) the ship was sunk vs the sunken ship; (2) the drunken sailor vs the sailor was drunk; (3) the pupil learned his lesson (learned, one syllable) vs the learned professor (learned, two syllables).
The adjective-participle quandary. There are certain situations where a participial adjective (invariably a past participle used as an adjective) is confused with a regular adjective. One should be alert to differentiate between, for example, (1) advance notice vs. advanced technology; (2) articulated lorry vs. articulate person; (3) express bus, express wish vs. expressed juice from the orange; (4) subject to vs. subjected to.
The dangling participle. Participles, like regular verbs, are normally governed by a subject, as in the following examples: (1) Running at a steady pace, he arrived home in good time (Running governed by the subject he); (2) Knocked down by a motorcyclist, the lady was badly bruised (Knocked, governed by the subject the lady).
Yet one commonly encounters sentences indifferently constructed so that the participle appears to be incongruously associated with the wrong noun as the subject. Such a participle, which is in search of its referent – or which seems to dangle – is known as a dangling participle.
The following is an example: Being the eldest son In the family, his parents doted on him. The sentence so constructed suggests that his parents is the subject, which governs both the verb doted and the participle being – in effect, his parents were the eldest son in the family and they doted on him. The spurious sentence construction could be corrected, with the same participle being used, in several ways, two of which are as follows: (1) by singling out the subject of the participle (He being the eldest son In the family, his parents doted on him.); or (2) by retaining the structure of the participial phrase but re-phrasing the main sentence (Being the eldest In the family, he was doted on by his parents).
Another example: Tired after a hard day’s work, sleep quickly overcame Mutu (the word tired is a dangling participle because it is incongruously governed by the subject sleep – in other words, sleep was tired!)
Parting shot. So tired after writing this article, I have to go to sle-e-e---...
* The distant mountain did not look out the window; the tourist did. The caption should read: ‘Looking out the window, the tourist likened the distant mountain to a giant cone enveloped in a faint mist.’
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