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.