On Non-Finite Verbs, Chapter 3: The Participles

Among the most common types of non-finite verbs we encounter are the participles. They are a very useful device in languages, providing much of the same utility as relative subclauses do.

 This essay will be a bit unstructured, but I will highlight certain things that relate to my core thesis, while keeping other things that I feel are of some interest for the wider topic.

Introducing English Participles

English has two participles, the "past" and the "present" participle. 'Done', 'doing'. These are interesting, as they do serve multiple roles that may be a bit atypical for participles (or, well, ymmv). The primary use for participles are somewhat "adjectival" or "relative subclause"-like uses, e.g.

smoked ham
the running man

English morphologically conflates its present participle with what we sometimes call the 'gerund' (running is fun); for weak verbs and some strong verbs, it also conflates the past participle with the past tense: a hunted animal; the man hunted animals.

 

However, at least for the past participle, some strong verbs have a distinct form, giving morphological justification for considering them separate: he threw a ball; a thrown ball.

 

An interesting aspect of the English past participle is that it somewhat conflates perfective/resultative aspect and passive:

a repaired clock (passive, perfective)
a well-slept child (active, perfective)

Both participles in English are used in combination with auxiliaries and other verbs for a variety of constructions, to the extent where they are used to form tense-aspect forms as well as the passive:

 

I saw him running
I want it repaired

 

he is running; he is done
he has done it.

He was seen.

 

Participles in English - and many other languages - overlap with both adjectives and verbs in their properties. Like adjectives, they can further be turned into nouns - which in English seems somewhat lexically determined.

 

On to Swedish

As in the previous instalment, Swedish is a nice object of comparison, since their very similar systems have diverged only a bit from their ancient shared origin. In Swedish, the present participle is sometimes used for non-subject roles, but unlike English, we cannot blame this on a gerund-participle conflation. The participles are less frequently used with auxiliaries or as complements of the copula, but this is not unknown either.

 

The past participle is still used in most traditional dialects for forming the perfect tense, but in the literary language, it has been replaced by something called the 'supine'. The supine originated as a spelling distinction that over time became a pronounced distinction:

skjuten (shot, past participle, common gender)

skjutet (shot, past participle, neuter)
skjutit (shot, supine)

For conjugations I and III, the supine is not distinct from the neuter past participle (e.g. 'sett' - seen, 'hittat' - found, vs. 'buret'/'burit'.).

 

jag har skjutit/*skjutet en hare

I have shot a hare

 

jag har sett/sett en film
I have seen a movie

 

In the perfect tense, however, the past participle or supine (depending on dialect) can do a thing it otherwise never permits: take the passive -s.

burken har förslutits
the jar has been closed
en *förslutens/försluten burk
a *closed's/closed jar

 

Swedish further has three ways of forming the passive: -s, the copula + past participle with congruence or 'bli' (become) + past participle with congruence. We find a pattern with the participles here, as English too has one of these ways of forming the passive. (Swedish bli-passive is perhaps somewhat similar to English get-passive, except that it is entirely acceptable in the formal language.)

 

Swedish has gender congruence on the past participle, as well as congruence on the complement of the copula, and thus the two periphrastic passives will have gender congruence:

burken är försluten (common)/*förslutet (neuter)/*förslutit (supine)
the jar is closed-COM/*closed-NEUT/closed-SUP
burken blev försluten/*förslutet/*förslutit
the jar became closed-COM/*closed-NEUT/*closed-SUP
burken förslöts
the jar closed-PASS

 

In literary Swedish, but not so much in dialects, the past participle feels more associated with passive meaning than in English, but this is somewhat lexical. The active välvilad (wellrested) works, but the likewise active välsoven (well-slept) seems a bit questionable (except dialectally it feels entirely fine for me! - in the standard language a 'välsoven natt' works, though, i.e. ' a well-slept night'!) In many Norrlandic and some east Swedish dialects, prefixing o- (un-) is a perfectly regular way of negating a perfective statement: jag är osoven (I haven't slept), jag är oäten (I haven't eaten). In standard Swedish, 'oäten' would only be applicable to leftovers: oäten mat (uneaten food).

 

Välsprungen (well run, as in the form of locomotion) would not be a way to describe an athlete who has run a lot - rather a worn running track.

... and, here, we spot something and return to English for a moment! ...

What's that? A running track? A track that ... runs? Clearly, English has a trick up its sleeve here too - present participles that don't describe a thing as doing something, but rather as being associated with something. Now, the English conflation between gerunds and participles can explain this, but ... we find the same thing in Swedish, in a much less ambiguously participal form (due to Swedish not conflating its gerunds and participles).

 

stående bord (buffet, but literally 'standing table'). All tables stand on legs, but this is standing in the sense that it is a table at which you stand, rather than are seated.

Stående bord especially interests me, as ... there's a claim among prescriptivists that this is a fennicism, i.e. a loan from Finnish due to the similarity with the Finnish 'seisova pöytä'. However! This makes little sense, as Swedish has a fairly solid set of phrases where an active participle does not encode subject role, whereas 'seisova pöytä' is nearly unique in Finnish as not encoding the subject role. It is almost certain that Finnish calqued 'seisova pöytä' from Swedish; Also, one finds 'stående bord' in 19th century literature from Sweden, not only from Swedish-language publications in Finland. There's also the entire concept of 19th century manor kitchens in Finland having an exceedingly Swedified version of Finnish.

 

Swedish also has dialectal expressions such as 'ä siand arbeit' (a seeing work, a work where your eyesight will guide you to do what's needed), and standard Swedish expressions such as 'stående ovationer' (standing ovations - again, this also holds in English; it is not the ovations that are standing, it is the people giving the ovations. But again, in English we could use the gerund as an explanatory model.)

Finnish participles

Finnish has five participles, four of which form a tidy square, and the fifth being something of a "transitive participle" (although not licensing "nominative subjects", but genitive ones).

In Finnish, the four main participles are very closely associated with the syntactical roles of subject/agent and object/patient.  However, they also encode tense, for a 4-way system of {present, past} x  {active, passive}

present active: näkevä, seeing
present passive: nähtävä, [noun] to be seen, seeable, being seen, that has to be seen, that must be seen
past active: nähnyt, having seen
past passive: nähty, seen, having been seen

However, we find that three of them are fairly simple to map to a subclause: näkevä - seeing - that sees; nähnyt - having seen - that has seen / that saw; nähty - having been seen - that was seen. BUT! Suddenly, nähtävä has a bunch of meanings with varying modality. 

 

And here, we might also notice the 'seeable'. So, why's not -able considered a participle in English?  It's fairly productive, and it's very much like a modal participle. I would figure it is merely tradition that it's not considered a participle. We will return to it further down.

 

As for the overlap with other forms; the -nyt participle is also used for forming the perfect - but in Finnish, this is done with the copula and number congruence (so you get the plural -neet in the plural: olemme menneet - we have gone; olen mennyt - I have gone). The passive perfect is formed by using -ty instead, so

hän on nähnyt meidät: he has seen us.acc

hänet on nähty: he.acc has been seen

 

Previously, we saw English and Swedish use the infinitive in this type of construction:

I heard him lecture on fungi.
Jag hörde honom föreläsa om svamp.

Not going to provide glosses for the Swedish as it is structurally identical to the English. English, however, permits using the present participle here:

I heard him lecturing on fungi.

(Some Swedish dialects also do this, but with an extra -s, probably of genitive origin, on the participle)

 Finnish exclusively uses the present active participle here, but with both the subordinate agent and the participle in the genitive.

kuuli-n heidä-n laula-va-n
heard-I they-gen singing-gen

 

The present participle in the genitive singular occurs not only with verbs like 'I saw him walking', but also with verbs like 'X seems to ...', and other verbs of  

 

There's also a similar construction with the past active participle, e.g.

Sano minun sanonneen, että ...
say-imp me-gen said.gen

"say that I said, that ..."

(Notice: the -nut participle marker has the allomorph -nee in all but the nominative case.) 

In Finnish, the genitive sometimes is the surface form of the accusative. This is not the case here, as these construction takes the genitive in the plural as well (which does not have genitive as its accusative, but conflates the accusative with nominative), as well as in the negative (where the partitive always replaces the accusative) - the genitives here clearly are something else than direct objects.

I am not aware of similar use of the past participle in Swedish or English. This is  limited to verbs subordinate to statements of cognition and reporting. Here, we do find a vague similarity in English with the present perfect participle: "I remember you telling me about Finnegans Wake". (Here, Swedish would call for a finite subclause!)

Thus, this is a part of grammar where some languages use the simplest infinitive form, others permit alternating between the infinitive and a participle, and some further require some kind of inflection on the participle. Other languages - such as Russian - call for subordinate finite clauses.

 

The passive present participle in combination with the copula forms 'must': 'minun on nähtävä se' "me.gen is see+prtcpl:pres,pass it" - "mine is seeing-passive it": I have to see it.

This requires a genitive subject and nominative or partitive object. Finnish does have other ways of forming this meaning, e.g. using the 'on pakko' construction or 'täytyy' auxiliary.

All of these participles be inflected for case and be used as nouns. Some nouns in fact derive from these forms: tehtävä - mission, task, from tehdä: to do. 'that which is to be done'. Etsivä - detective; '(s)he who searches'. Edesmennyt - a deceased. Etsitty - someone who is 'wanted' or searched for. The boundary between adjective and noun is weaker in Finnish than in English.

 

The fifth form, that did not fit in the square system, is called the agent participle:

rakenta-ma-ni talo
built-my house
minun rakenta-ma talo
my built house

 

It has case congruence with the main noun:

Jackin rakentama-ssa talo-ssa
Jack's built-in house-in
in the house that Jack built

The agent participle is underspecified for tense, but is basically a 'transitive participle' in some sense, except it requires the agent to be expressed as a possessor: *rakentama talo is not possible. However, 'kenen rakentama ...' (whose built ...) or 'jonkun rakentama ...' (someone's built) or 'ei kenenkään rakentama talo' (no one's built house - a house no one built) are all permissible. It is also worth noting here that it does not permit a nominative subject: minä rakentama talo ('the I built house') is wrong; minun rakentama talo ('the my built house') is correct.

A lexicalized participle that is become more of an adjective than a verb form can take comparison, but this is not all that common: juoksevampi (runnier), sopivampi (more fitting), ... unohtuneempi (more forgotten), syötävämpi, 

One can encounter both standing tables ('seisova pöytä') and standing ovations ('seisovat aplodit') but these are very unnatural to Finnish, clearly calques of Swedish, and generally avoided by many speakers in favour of more natural collocations.

 

(A small edit: while writing this essay, I did encounter a use of the agent participle, -ma, that basically replaced an active present participle with it. Here's the full sentence: "Usein terveydelliset, taloudelliset ja sosiaaliset ongelmat taustalla, esimerkiksi lapsuus huonosti voimassa perheessä. " "Often health-related, economical or social issues in the background, for instance childhood in a badly functioning family." ) I am not sure if this was just ... a mis-edit, a typo or something else.

Russian

Russian is interesting for two reasons here. Its synchronic system is somewhat similar to the Finnish system, but with some extra distinctions. Also, the existence of finite forms originating with former participles in Russian lends some diachronic interest. 

 

We begin looking at the historical development of the past tense - it is basically a former past participle of some sort. Since Russian is zero-copula, "he is slept" is, word for word, "he slept". This development lead to the Russian past marking for gender and number being present in the past tense, but no person marking. Here are some examples with the verb stroit', 'build'.

 

on stroil dom - he built a house
ona stroila dom - she built a house.
oni stroili dom - they built a house.

 

The past passive in Russian consists of the passive participle of the perfect verb. For stroit', the perfect verb is postroit', giving us dom postro-en. 'house buil-t'. Unlike English, the perfect passive participle is not the same as 'built', i.e. 'on (po)stroi-l dom' - he built house.

So, here we have two examples of finite verbs emerging from non-finite ones (or do we?). We will return to this in a bit.

 

Let's now consider the current participle system of Russian:

 

active: stroyashiy stroivshiy
passive: stroimyj - stroenniy
adverbial: stroya - stroiv, stroivshi

The system combines tense and voice, {past, non-past} x {active, passive, adverbial}. However, Russian also has a lexically marked aspect system; imperfective verbs have past and non-past participles, perfective ones merely a past participle. Thus, postroit' only has the postroivshiy column.

 

Ultimately, thus: {past-perfective, past-imperfective, non-past-imperfective} x {active, passive, adverbial}.

 

The adverbial is similar to the use of '-ing' in English in a sort of 'dangling' fashion:

Having eaten dinner, he went to sleep.
She finished the work soon, having prepared herself well.

Sighing, he walked across the room.

 

In Russian, these always have the same subject as the clause they are embedded in. The adverbial expresses a variety of meanings, partially influenced by the tense and aspect. Simultaneous actions, situation (sitting in my chair ...), manner, sequences of events, preceding states, causes, conditional protasis, and also sometimes concessions ('even knowing the dangers'). Adverbial use of participles though - is this really the same thing as adjectival use? This is very similar to converbs, which we will look into in the next instalment, as it turns out there's some significant differences between the 'basic' use of a participle as an adjective, and the multitude of roles adverbs may express in these necks of the typological woods.

Latin

Latin offers two categorizations. Some count this slightly asymmetrical set: 

Present active, future active, past passive, future passive.

Others again reject the future passive (~ the gerundive) from the list, and reduce them to past, present and future.

 

In English, the Latin gerundive often would correspond to the infinitive used as an attribute: an idea to consider. However, the fact that English uses an infinitive there is irrelevant for the cross-linguistic consideration. In Finnish, the present past participle would be used there: varteenotettava idea. Thus, we cannot merely base our rejection of this form from the list of participles on the use of an infinitive for corresponding structures in English.

 

Starting with the gerundive, we get e.g. "volumen legendum est" - the volume is to be read. The gerundive can be used both as attribute and as complement of the copula. It inflects like a regular adjective. In combination with e.g. 'receive, have, give a thing', it can signify some obligation or necessary work: I gave him some work to do. It can also just modify a thing in general.

 

The present active participle, legens. Legens puer: a reading boy. This too inflects like an adjective, and can be used as an attribute, a complement or more adverbially - it, and the past passive can be used more 'adverbially', a bit like the Russian adverbial uses above. In these instances, Classical Latin participles will be in the ablative, as will their agents (in the case of the present participle) or patients (for the past participle).  

The future active participle does have some interesting wrinkles: in combination with 'esse' it basically expresses some form of (potential) future, or pluperfect subjunctive (when esse is in the past tense). It also combines with 'hope', 'seem' and similar verbs.

 

With both NP and participle in the future active, it can express 'while the NP was about to ...', and with a subject and the participle in the future active, it can express the subject's intentions or goals (that the main verb strives to attain). It can also express a likely quality of a thing. 

 

The present and past participle do pattern together somewhat in a way the other two forms don't, which somewhat justifies treating them separately. For this reason, there's five segments here: shared behaviors of past and present; followed by unique behaviors of each. 

 I would recommend reading through a few pages here: https://dcc.dickinson.edu/grammar/latin/uses-participles. 

A return to English

Beyond the previously mentioned forms, English offers us another way of deriving adjectives from verbs: -able, -ible. This isn't available for all verbs (beable? becomable? sitable? eatable? talkable?). Why isn't it considered a modal participle? Perhaps tradition? Perhaps it's not integrated into any constructions? (I do find that explanation somewhat disputable, though.) Further, English does, as mentioned in a previous installment, allow using the infinitive as an attribute: the first man to walk on the moon, an idea to consider, etc. We could well term this 'participial infinitive' or somesuch if we wanted.

A tangential ramble: intermediate finiteness?

We saw that the Russian past tense, and the perfect passive originate with constructions utilizing participles, but over time turning into something that is, or at least looks (borderline) finite.

 

In Russian, it turns out the past and the passive are not 'equally finite', however: the passive does have an underlying copula that resurfaces in e.g. the future tense, whereas the past ... is the past - no copula ever resurfaces. The past tense is the only "proper" finite verb in Russian to have a known origin as a non-finite one. The omission of the copula for the past participle is sort of expected in Russian, as this is also how regular statements involving copulas work.

 

At some point, it seems reasonable to posit that the Russian past tense had an actual zero copula, and the loss of this copula propagated through the population, turning the former past participle into an actual past tense finite verb. In Polish, the copula is still present, although usually incorporated into the past form.

 

I mentioned the Swedish supine above, and it might be in a state of  development towards some kind of almost finite status: in subclauses, the auxiliary can be omitted, but not in main clauses.

Jag har läst Finnegans Wake.
I have read Finnegans Wake.

Jag visste inte att hon (har) sjungit i kör

I knew not that she (has) sung in (a) choir.

 

This is somewhat rare in the spoken language, although I believe that it's more common than the literature on the topic claims.  (Most descriptions hold that this is restricted to writing, but I am almost certain this has not been properly studied. This form is apparently an old Low German influence in 'kanslisvenska', i.e. "office Swedish".)

 

We can also look at Finnish and its two perfect participles for this. Finnish negation utilizes a negative auxiliary (not far from how English does, really, with its 'do(es)n't', except English has a whole array: isn't, hasn't, couldn't, can't, won't. Finnish lets the one auxiliary e- do almost all the negating). The negative auxiliary only marks two grammatical categories: person and mood (the imperative has a suppletive negative auxiliary form). The negative auxiliary takes a form called the 'conegative' in the present; in the past tense, it takes the perfect participle.

 

Nuokaisija kävi eilen.
The chimney sweep came by yesterday.

Nuokaisija ei käynyt eilen.

The chimney sweep didn't come by yesterday.

 

(In the present tense: 'ei käy'; in the passive: ei käyty - utilizing the past passive participle. The present tense conegative coincides with the singular imperative.)

Is the conegative a non-finite form? Its overlap with the participle vaguely points that way. And obviously, it can't stand without its auxiliary. However, ... the auxiliary is defective in some way as it only marks person (and mood!), but not tense and aspect. The way in which the Finnish negative auxiliary and the lexical verb shares responsibility for producing a complete predicate could be an interesting case study for marginal (non-)finiteness for a conlanger.

 

A further example of category-hopping can be found in Finnish. We know that the third person plural originates with a participle form:

menevät, tulevat, lähtevät is the present participle with a plural nominative suffix on top.  Apparently, the third person plural verb form previously was merely menet, tulet, lähdet - which coincides with the second person singular verb form. (-t is the plural nominative marker, so this was probably a very similar type of congruence to the adjectival congruence in e.g. 'pienet talot' - small-s house-s.)

This might have triggered the push to use the participle instead. Here, the participal form has been extended to the past tense as well, including 'menivät', 'tulivat', which has not suffused back onto the participles. In some dialects, the third person has also often used a form derived from the singular present participle - menepi, ompi, etc.

 

We will see more examples of verb forms that go from finite to non-finite or vice versa as this series of essays continues, and we'll also find that the exact dividing line between finite and non-finite is far from clear. However, as participles often encode some form of TAM, they seem very likely to be reinterpreted as finite forms.

Detail #444: Doubly Marked Comparison

One way of stucturing particle-based comparisons that I have not seen is one of using two particles, one for each comparand. Let's notate these as C_g and C_l, for comparand_greater and comparand_lesser. In the most basic expression, you maybe coordinate them with an 'and':

C_g John and C_l Eric is fast(er)

John is faster than Eric

-(er) might be superfluous, but what if there are several other things that could be the compared quality, e.g.

C_g John and C_l Eric sail heavy boats often.

Does John sail heavier boats often, or does he sail heavy boats more often? So, for now, I'm going to keep the -er morpheme here.

What benefits does such a system bring? It signals that a comparison is coming very early. It also permits for some ... oddities.

C_l Eric.nom counted C_g the sheep.acc.

 Eric counted fewer than the sheep. (Eric didn't count all the sheep)

One could also imagine situations where the particles are off in different main clauses, and maybe even mark non-NPs?:

John hits C_l hard and Eric can C_g take.
Eric can take harder hits than John dishes out.

 This is not meant to be a full description of a system, but just some thoughts on how to restructure comparison and maybe innovate a slight bit, as well as the possible concerns one might look at.

On Non-Finite Verbs, Chapter 2: The Basic Infinitive

How much is there to write about the basic infinitive? A surprising lot, really.

The English Infinitive

The English infinitive does happen to be the dictionary form, and is basically the stem of the verb. It has a morphological quirk, in that some auxiliaries lack an infinitive. Such lacks do happen for individual non-auxiliary verbs in some languages, e.g. Finnish lacks one for one of its verbs for 'to itch'.

What does the infinitive do? The typical response would perhaps be 'serves as the subordinate verb for another verb', but this misses several other uses, and also conflates several rather distinct uses into a single category.

Let's start out with the subordinate verb, though.

he will go
he wants to go

Already here we find a nice split - infinitives with and without 'to'. This is mainly governed by the finite verb (a certain class called 'modal auxiliaries' do not take them - but this class is not strictly described by its name - some modal auxiliaries have no modal meaning, some non-modal auxiliaries do, etc.

We do also find e.g. a modal use of the verb 'have' taking to+inf: I have to go.

A different verbal construction where the infinitive is featured is this:

I saw her dance the jig
She listened to him play the cembalo

These don't convey the same thing as a subclause; it's not "I saw when she danced the jig" or "I saw that she danced the jig". More like, "I saw the event consisting of her dancing the jig", having the agent of the subordinate verb be both the object of the main verb and subject of the subordinate one.

And further this:

He wanted us to go away
We asked him to sing a song

These four previous examples differ from earlier ones in having a different agent of the infinitive than of the main verb; this agent is not marked as a canonical subject, however, but by an oblique case. It is not very unusual in languages for infinitives not to be able to take canonical subjects, but rather to take some form of oblique agent.

Infinitives can also act as nouns that are a stand-in for the verb phrase in statements about a verb phrase:

to paint the house is quite the chore
to win is fun
to err is human

In English, both 'to paint' and the participle/gerund 'painting' can serve in this position. These can take oblique subjects, 'for us to pay these debts will take years', 'her singing at the opera tonight will be spectacular'.

The infinitive can also work as an attribute of a noun:

the will to live
the desire to seek revenge
failure to comply
a sight to see
the first woman to serve as judge
the only man to admit to being wrong

Some of these seem to be almost like relative subclauses! Further, sometimes they are passive (a sight to see), sometimes active (the first woman to serve as a judge).

Arguably, English infinitives can mark certain one tense distinction and voice - 'to see' , 'to have seen', 'to be seen', 'to have been seen'. They can also be negated, and depending on your stance, either with the 'not' before or after 'to'. Some positions seem not to license the perfect tense:

*I saw him have hit the jackpot
I saw him be beaten by a gangster
*I saw him have been beaten by a gangster

 There are more ways it is used in English, but I will introduce them later on in this post.

The Swedish Infinitive

The English infinitive has a very similar cousin in Swedish. It has even undergone a similar development after the languages diverged, where both acquired a preposition that marked them, and this preposition indeed splits the auxiliaries mainly along very similar lines. Don't quote me on this, but I suspect Swedish has more 'subtle collocations', here, where some combinations of auxiliary and main verb may deviate from the more regular pattern for an auxiliary.

 All the syntactical details above hold for Swedish as well, but here we get a bit of a deviation: in Swedish, infinitives are more often attributes of nouns than they are in English. Especially in cases where they are not subclause-like in meaning.

konsten att förföra
"the art to seduce"
~ the art of seduction

This is significantly more common in Swedish than English, with constructions like viljan att leva (the will to live), en baddare att sjunga (a whiz of singing), etc being fairly frequent in texts.

 Swedish also likes having infinitives as attributes of adjectives:

han är bra att laga mat
he is good to cook food

hon är rolig att tala med
she is fun to talk to

vi är svåra att slå 
we are hard to beat

Obviously, two of these work in English too! But the first example is weird. English prefers either 'he cooks well', or 'he is good at cooking'. 

Other than these differences, the main differences appear in some raising-structures. We will look more into such things later.

Morphologically though, Swedish differs from English: the infinitive is a particular inflected form of the verb. The suffix that marks the infinitive is -a, but this may be suppressed if the stem ends in a vowel. The imperative happens to coincide with the stem for conjugations I and III, but for II and IV, the imperative does not coincide with the infinitive. C.f. hoppa <> hoppa ('to jump, to hop'); springa <> spring ('to run'). Thus, in Swedish, -a is (sometimes) a morpheme marking the infinitive, sometimes -a is supressed.

The Swedish infinitive can be negated - with the negation going between 'att' and the infinitive (or before the infinitive if 'att' is absent). It can also take the passive -s suffix, or use any of the other passive constructions. It can also be in the perfect ~tense, but this is also restricted in ways very similar to English.

In both English and Swedish, infinitives can sometimes have "non-anaphoric" reflexives: to know oneself is important; att känna sina gränser är viktigt (to know one's own limits is important).

The Finnish Infinitive

Finnish has an awkward nomenclature, including several numbered infinitives. However, the infinitive I is the most similar to the above forms in use: it is used after modal auxiliaries and after some other auxiliaries. It is not used in constructions such as 'I heard him sing', where a participle is used instead. Even for the infinitive I, Finnish does have an analogous formation to the English 'to'-infinitive: -kse.

onnistua -> onnistuakse-

This is not used quite as frequently as the English to-forms - it is for instance not used as a subject of a statement about the verb, or as the subordinate verb of an auxiliary or such. Oftentimes, it corresponds to the English 'so as to [inf]', or 'for to [inf]', but will sometimes correspond to just a 'to [inf]' construction. However! Sometimes this will correspond to infinitive IV instead, so ... this will require further investigation in post focusing on the Finnish system.

 

The -kse-infinitive further requires a possessive suffix corresponding to the subject: onnistuakseni (for me to succeed), onnistuaksesi (for you to succeed), etc.

 

Onnistuakseni tarvitsen apua -> for me to succeed, I need help

Lui-n kirja-n oppia-kse-ni musiikkiteoria-n alkee-t.
read-I book-acc learn-kse-my musictheory's foundation-s.

 

Comparing and contrasting the Finnish non-finite landscape to the English system will be done in a later post.

 

As an attribute, the basic infinitive I is similar to Swedish with regards to things like 'the skill to cook good food' (kyky laittaa hyvää ruokaa), but the infinitive I cannot be used in an active relative subclause  type of way; however, as a passive subclause it can work: 'hyvä kirja lukea lomalla', although a different form might be more idiomatic (luettavaksi or lukemaksi, the first a passive present participle, the second an infinitive IV, both in the translative case). Here, certain adjectives and quantifiers seem to license the use of an infinitive as an attribute or as a complement of the copula. The -kse-infinitive can also be used as an attribute expressing for whom something is for doing something to: eväitä syödäksesi: snacks-part eat-inf-kse-yours: snacks for you to eat. However, the passive present participle is more often used for this.

 

As a complement of the copula, the Finnish infinitive I further signifies 'almost did', often as a near-miss accident. "Olin kompastua" - I was (about to) stumble.

 

Finnish does not use the infinitive I for construction such as 'I saw her dance'. Instead it uses the active present participle in the genitive, thus a bit like 'I saw her dancing', but actually 'I saw her dancing's'.

The infinitive cannot be passive; any passivization would instead use some kind of passive participle. The infinitive cannot be negated using the regular 'ei-' negation strategy; instead, olla +mAttA, i.e. essentially 'be without [verb]ing' is used instead.

 

The infinitive can  take the perfect tense, but this seems very rare to me - I do find an example 'olla syönyt ateria' - to have eaten a meal. Some case shenanigans actually feel more natural to me: 'To have run', for instance, could come out as 'olla juoksuneena', essentially 'to be [in the role of] having run'. The 'olla syönyt' construction does work as subordinate of other verbs, but feels odd when used more nominally.

The Portuguese Infinitive

Famously, Portuguese infinitives can inflect for person. I am not an expert on the syntax of the infinitive in Portuguese, so this will be left here for now as a sort of heads-up.

A tabular representation of some differences of the basic infinitive

This table will grow over time, with all kinds of subcases and differences, and of course several forms per language. I figure colour-coding will also help seeing what's going on once it starts growing unwieldy.

Property	English	Swedish	Finnish I	Portuguese
Citation form	✓	✓	✓	✓
Infinitive marker (like to, att)	✓ (sometimes)	✓ (sometimes)	✗ (infinitive II is structurally similar to such a marker)	✗
Dedicated infinitive ending	✗	✓	✓	✓
Person agreement	✗	✗	✗ (mandatory on infinitive II)	✓
Voice distinctions	✓	✓	✓/✗*	✓
Tense / aspect distinctions	✓ (limited)	✓ (limited)	(rare)	✓
Regular negation	✓	✓	✗	✓

* The Finnish passive is really more of an indefinite person; however,  Finnish has a significant bunch of valency- and transitivity-altering derivative suffixes, which do permit infinitives. IMHO, saying that the Finnish infinitive can't be passive is thus marginally misleading, but 'traditionally' correct.

Summary:

We've seen some differences between infinitives in four languages of Europe; the "basic" infinitives of these languages all have a core of shared uses:

• A sort of noun-like head of a verb phrase
• A verb that is subordinated under another verb in some way.

 However, we find differences as well: the use of markers like to/att, the use of infinitives as attributes, their syntactic distribution in general, and how the roles that one language's infinitive takes is distributed onto other forms in other languages.

Turns out the infinitive is not so much a single thing as a complex of things.

 

On Non-Finite Verbs pt 1: Introduction

Non-finite verbs are a somewhat under-described thing in conlangs in general. Oftentimes, a conlang will "have" an infinitive, but the author will not describe it in any detail, leaving us to assume its usage is similar to the English infinitive. Infinitives are of course not the only type of non-finite verb either.

Even within Europe, there's differences in how non-finite verbs work. Let's begin by consider a short list of terms.

• Infinitives
• Gerunds
• Supines
• Converbs
  
• Participles
• Other 

A line-up of the usual suspects (and some new acquaintances?)

Nota bene: the terminology for non-finite verb forms is very tradition-dependant. A term can be used in different languages in very different ways. Thus, we cannot derive any typological observations from the names here. I'll, however, ... yeah, ignore that a bit.

Non-finite verbs

 Non-finite verbs are verbs that (usually) cannot be the predicate of a clause. They often are morphologically somewhat 'deficient', lacking some category that finite verbs mark; however, they may also mark morphological categories that make little sense on finite verbs.

Infinitive 

The "basic" infinitive is often - but not always - the dictionary form, c.f. Latin where the present first person singular is the dictionary form. In many European languages, its most typical use is that of being a subordinate verb to an auxiliary:

I will go.
You can always hope.
He wants to learn to play the piano.

Here, we can see a few interesting things: in English, some auxiliaries require a particle before the infinitive. Also, infinitives can be subordinate to infinitives.

Infinitives are not necessarily "uninflected". In German, Swedish, Russian, Finnish and many other languages, the basic infinitive in fact has some morphological marker on it:

essen, äta, est', syödä

Further into this series, we'll look at what uses the 'basic' infinitive is put to in different languages, and we'll find that even this "basic component" varies in many ways from language to language.

Participles

Participles are forms that express something along the lines of a relative subclause: 

a singing man <> a man who sings
a destroyed house <> a house that has been destroyed

 This hides within its scope a lot of space for variation as well. Usually, participles are 'adjective-like verbs' in some sense. Germanic languages conflate voice and TAM a bit for these, whereas other languages may keep these more distinct.

Gerunds

A gerund is often something of a 'nominalization' of a verb; "the act of ...". In English, this is largely conflated with the present participle, but in some languages it's a distinct form, and even in English, regular infinitives sometimes operate a bit like gerunds.

 

Sleeping is important.
I like playing the bass.

 

Unlike nouns, they can take arguments along the lines of subjects and objects, but they may operate under other restrictions and rules for case assignment (or similar) than a finite verb.

 

Latin has a form called the gerundive;  this is a 'modally specific' participle in some sense: viz. "that which needs to be destroyed/repaired/...".

 

The Latin gerund is not quite the same as the 'gerund' in general, but will be dealt with in greater detail later.

Verb nouns 

Some sources distinguish these from gerunds, but this is a confused mess. Just generally perhaps 'the less canonically verb-like and more canonically noun-like the form is, the more justified this term is'?

Deverbal nouns

Deverbal nouns are perhaps the furthest removed from verbs, often breaking argument structure, taking adjectives instead of adverbs, etc. 

Masdar

This term is used in Arabic linguistics and in some traditions influenced by it, and is about as messy as the latin-based terminology.  

Supine

In Latin, the supine is a non-finite form that has a specific selection of cases; it often is used for the subordinate verb when something is done in order to do something else. In Swedish, it is a verb form only used to form the perfect tense.

Serial verbs 

These are verbs which derive TAM and subject and so on from a previous verb.

Converbs

Subordinate infinite verbs that provide some kind of additional information about the main verb: 'while singing', 'by poking', 'not to annoy ...', 'so as to unshackle'.

Transgressives

This seems to be a west slavic term for converbs.

Plan

I will present some of these categories in some detail, and then go into greater detail with regards to the systems present in several languages, sometimes comparing and contrasting similar languages (like Swedish and English). Later on, I may get back to a sort of 'typologizing' description of the categories. My intention is to map out at least some of the interesting bits of this parameter space for conlangers.

"Interwoven" Conreligions in the Bryatesle world

In the Dairwueh-Bryatesle world, several types of religions exist by the side of the standard religions, and have overlap of membership. How does this work?

These religions, much like the standard religions, have rituals, myths, a membership structure - often with a hierarchy, supernatural beings, and sometimes even texts. However, they differ in "magisterium" from other religions. A rather illustrative example of this are the two sailor religions.

The Dairwueh and Bryatesle are largely maritime civilizations. Sailors have always nurtured a lore of their own, and in the DB world, this lore has come to form much tighter, cohesive structures than on earth. 

However, there are two competing, major sailor religions - and these can strongly disapprove of each other's views regarding a variety of things, and crews are therefore often rather uniform when it comes to religion. Sailors come from most of the normal Bryatesle and Dairwueh religious backgrounds, and have these religions as an equal part of their religious mental landscape. Conflicts between your "land" religion and your sailor religion may be just never resolved, or may affect how you pick which sailor religion to join. Options may be scarce, however, if you live in a port where only one of the religions are widely represented.

1. The western sailor religion

Appeasement of hostile spirits is an important part of the ritual system.

Certain colours of sails are considered lucky: red is especially favoured. Passengers need to participate in a special ritual on land before embarking and are forced to wear special clothing during their voyage. This clothing in fact also has some buoyancy, essentially being a type of proto-life vest.

The ritual includes eating a small amount of seafood, confessing to the captain any sins one has committed that may anger God and cause him to prevent the ship from reaching the harbour, and a form of baptism. The idea of the baptism is this: if it is your lot in life to drown, God should take this opportunity and not pull the entire ship down for your sake.

The spirits of the sea are not considered evil or good per se, but rather neutral and sometimes ill-tempered. Areas where particularly nasty spirits are held to be present are avoided. Spirits tend not to relocate.

Former sailors are still held to be ritually valid members, and must participate in sailor rituals rather than passenger rituals (and may not need to wear the passenger-clothing if travelling as passengers).

There are no, or nearly no 'secrets' that cannot be divulged to outsiders. Family members on land are expected to participate in some land-based ceremonies and even carry out their own rituals on land, and often contribute to the production of ritual articles - including the clothing for passengers.

There is a pope-like figure, the father captain. He has quite some political clout, and can, for instance, declare embargoes against city-states or villages. The clergy consists of the captains.

If circumstances allow, there are regular religious services on the deck - nearly every day. Even those sailors who are confined to the brig are permitted to be on the deck for this. Some parts of the rituals are not permissible for passengers (but can be witnessed). The service also includes judgement in case such is needed, and the administration of minor punishments may occur during or immediately after the service. Rewards, promotions and the sharing of plans occur during these services.

The services include tales of sea monsters and spirits, singing, often a shared meal, and sometimes a sermon. This sermon may include any kind of advice, not only ethical: "in our next harbour, avoid the bar at the western pier".

Songs are sometimes veiled in metaphors and allegory, but this is not a mandatory feature: the message can be clear.

2. The eastern sailor religion

Appeasement is considered an invitation; therefore, they instead try different types of ritual exorcisms. The lore teaches that there are two basic sides of spirits at work over the seas, and these blocks are basically "cohesive". Thus, there is one evil block and one good block. Evil spirits do not counteract each other (generally). Good spirits, are not to be invoked willy-nilly, and may demand quite a hefty price if invoked in vain.

Routes where evil spirits largely holds sway are avoided; however, a ritual exorcism may be successful, and an area may become acceptable again. Evil can also retake areas.

Some groups within the religion even make up plans for how to wage the spiritual war against evil spirits. There is no top leader. Sometimes, the dozen or so grand boatswains gather and hold synods. Individual grand boatswains may abstain from adhering by the decisions. Captains are also important authorities, but do not hold a comparable religious function as boatswains do, and are way less involved with the rituals of the eastern sailors.

Travelers are expected not to participate in the rituals, and the less a voyager knows about the rituals, the happier the sailors are. Former sailors are considered (respected) outsiders and must no longer participate in rituals. Family on land are expected to abide by their land-based religion and not to pry into the secrets of the seas.

The full crew seldom participates in services and rituals, but rather it tends to be subsets at any time. In harbours, however, some full crew services do take place.

Many songs sung to synchronize the work have lyrics that refer to the tenets of the religion; however, these are often shrouded in metaphors so as to prevent voyagers from being able to figure out what is what. 

3. Pirates

Some pirates have subverted both of these religions in a way similar to how e.g. some forms of satanism subverts Christianity in our world. They may seek to collaborate with evil spirits, or even control them. They attempt to bind or prevent good spirits from doing their thing. There are both 'eastern' and 'western'-aligned (anti-aligned?) pirates, but the dividing lines are not as strict, and subverting both at the same time is possible. Western and eastern pirates thus have a weird ecumenism.

Interactions with land-based religions

Most of the land-based clergy respect the sea-based clergy, but there are a few minor conflicts. The main conflicts are between the western captains and the Kaildaper clergy. These religions have some shared roots (since kaildaper evolved among western fishermen), historically, but differ on how they interpret the traditions in rather conflicting ways. Despite, or maybe due to the even greater theological distance to the eastern sailor religion, there is no conflict between the kaildaper and eastern sailors.

Some crews are purely kaildaper crews for this reason.

Eastern ships grant land-based clergymen the right to minister to voyagers aboard, western ships do not. Western ships expect even clergymen to participate in western ritual. This is seldom, but sometimes, a problem.

Modern times

The long-term effects of these practices include:

• The emergence of two main sailor's trade union organization 'family trees'.
• Rather different structure of division of responsibility between the upper parts of the crew hierarchy in the two different unions.
• Many of the rituals survive even though few know or care about their meaning.
• Many superstitions about dangerous spirits on the sea are still held by significant numbers of sailors.
  

Herder religion

Among shepherds and other herders, certain ritual practices and beliefs are commonplace. Dogs are granted burials in dog burial grounds. Dogs that died fighting a predator get special rituals and special markers at their graves. Small sacrifices at dog burial grounds are a regular occurrence.

There are also rituals - some of them very short and low effort -  to participate in when slaughtering a sheep; when acquiring sheep; when acquiring an already trained dog; when acquiring an untrained dog; when going to sleep in the fields; when acquiring new pastures; when selling pastures; when having pastures; when encountering thunder; when encountering fog. The use of willow flutes also has some religious significance, as does the use of horns made from sheep or goat horns.

Although not fully uniform, the similarity of herder practices over the entire Dairwueh-Bryatesle word is remarkable.

Early industrial-worker religion

As industrialization lead to urbanization, rural practices entered towns and were mixed - and as living conditions changed, the practices also adapted to their times. Organized religion conserved some of the rituals and practices fairly well, but those beliefs and practices that were outside of the scope of the major religions quickly morphed. Traditional wolf-scaring rituals morphed into carnivals full of revelry; the springtime celebrations of the first harvestable edible things morphed into slightly less intense celebrations full of revelry. In general, industrial-worker religion tended to be quite full of revelry - but early industry in the DB world was quite lethal compared to all other work except that of the sailor.

Due to the amount of revelry involved, university students adopted some of the industrial-worker practices as well, but there is an amount of distrust between workers and students, as they often come from quite different class backgrounds. 

Miner religions

There are several mining-related systems of lore and ritual. There are even systems with miner monks. The miner religions are closely linked with mining engineering, the clergy essentially being mining engineers - but with required knowledge of the supernatural lore and rituals as well. Some miners are closely aligned with one or another system and will avoid working at mines where other ritual systems are prevalent. In some way, these are competing mining guilds which guard their knowledge carefully.

University religions

Universities tend to have their own identity, ritual systems, orders and hierarchies, and even beliefs. In the Dairwueh-Bryatesle world, the similarity to religion is even stronger than here, and in some sense the university ritual systems are essentially parallel religions. The university religion of course has two clearly separate blocks - the teachers and the students. Mostly, these have their own concerns, but on some occasions, the two blocks meet on an almost even footing in ritualized forms. Often including some level of revelry.

Medical doctors

In the DB world, medical doctors also have their own rituals, hierarchies and myths. Beliefs exist in this sphere as well, but evidence-based beliefs are mildly tolerated if they conflict with the historical medical dogma. Students of medicine do study at universities in the DB world, but tend to have their own separate system within the university world, unlike the other subjects.  

Detail #443: Doubly anchored kinship terms

 Some languages have compounds of e.g. "father" and "son" that express a group consisting of a father and a son. However, one could imagine a situation where a noun in fact conveys a single person (or multiple persons), characterized by their separate relationships to the speaker and the addressee or to some other referents.

Let's consider three generations, from oldest to younger: Anna, Beata and Cecilia.

Anna is mother and grandmother to Beata and Cecilia. Beata is daughter to Anna, and mother to Cecilia. Cecilia is daughter to Beata and granddaughter to Anna. 

Let us now imagine there being a word each of these can use when talking to the other to express both persons' relationships to the third. A simple compound could do the trick - grandchild-child, daughter-mother. This might sound a bit weird, but on the other hand, let's consider a different relation: grandchild-niece (Beata's sister Diana's daughter Emilia).

Of course, one could also consider how the relation to whom is marked - is it just 'our grandchild-niece' or is it "grandchild-mine-niece-yours"? If the simpler approach, does the grammar force some certain order? The oldest generation first? Some particular closeness first? Higher status first?

Maybe some of these words even have specialized lexemes that are not portmanteaus or compounds, but indivisible stems - that perchance are doubly possessed in a particular order?

And maybe it goes beyond relatives, and includes certain kinds of other formalized relations - spouses, in-laws, but also perhaps sworn allies of some kind, and as society progresses even colleagues?

 

Detail #376 Revisited: Quirky Adjectives

 In quirky adjectives I considered some quirky things adjectives can cause. Some new ideas that have occurred to me are:

• Offset gender, number or definiteness marking on the noun
• Specific adjectives that force plural marking on collective singular nouns
• Adjectives that cause nouns to have special case marking in comparisons
• Adjectives that force explicit plural marking (or explicit singular marking) on numerals.
• In a language where numerals are followed by singulars, consider 'the_pl honorable_pl five_pl members of this committee', and for a language where they're normally followed by singulars, 'the_sg honorable_sg five_sg member of this committee'. For the case with forced plural marking, consider the case 'the_pl honorable_pl one_pl member_pl of this committee'.
• Adjectives that change the scope of negation and quantifiers around them, while also having actual adjectival semantics. E.g. 'no student solved every ADJ task' - imagine the adjective here is something like 'damned', but also pulls along a change in scope such that it now means 'no student solved any task'.
• Words that syntactically are adjectives, but semantically are voice operators, so that e.g. a certain adjective specifies that the noun in fact is the marker makes both marks 'this clause is passive' and the agent of the clause by its mere presence. This could also perhaps work with e.g. tense as adjectives instead, such that e.g. multiple contrasting subjects of different tense (or even objects) could coexist. This isn't tense of NPs, this is tense of VPs marked as an adjectival marker inside the NP.