Talk:Participle

message: Why is there nothing yet about participles in other languages? (Rhetorical question, but answer if the Muse moves you.) Michael Hardy 03:47, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Oh ... I see Latin is mentioned.  That's at least a start. Michael Hardy03:50, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Nothing about participles in other languages? 

message: 'A few irregular verbs have two non-synonymous past participles: One may say "The ship has sunk" or "The divers found a sunken ship."'
"Sunken" is not a past participle. It's an adjective identical in form to the older past participle of "sink." You can say "the sunk ship" or "the sunken ship," but you can only say "the ship has sunk," because "the ship has sunken" is incorrect.
In fact, there are no non-synonymous pairs of past participles ("sneaked" and "snuck", "dreamed" and "dreamt" --> same meanings). If no one disagrees in the next few days or so, i'll make the edit myself. - JRiddy 12/01/05
:I completely agree. Ruakh 03:41, 2 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:   

message: Wherever this article was copied from was a poor source. No mention that the participles are perfect and imperfect (it's actually misleading to call the perfect participle "past" because a/ it's used in the perfect tense -- a present tense and b/ it's used adjectivally to describe objects that are very much present. The stuff about "passive" was written by someone who simply didn't think about the perfect tense. It would have been better to say that the perfect participle is used in the passive, rather than suggesting it's in itself passive, which it isn't. The stuff about "sunk" and "sunken" is nonsense and needs deleting as per the discussion above. 203.206.87.165 05:27, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Explaining changes

message: In the opening line of the article it states that a participle is a "verbal adjective".  Since a participle is an inflected form of a verb that has the function of an adjective, wouldn't it be more correct to call it a "adjectival verb"?  Calling it a "verbal adjective" seems to imply that a participle is actually an adjective in form that is functioning as a verb, but this is not the case.  In a sentence like "The walking dog", "walking" is a verb in form, but is has the function of an adjective.  Does anyone agree with this? (edit: updated signature only.) dt 20:46, 23 September 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry, but I disagree: in "the walking dog," "walking" is an adjective modifying "dog." It's inflected from a verb — hence verbal adjective — but it's still an adjective. (Even if you convinced me, it wouldn't matter; the term is quite standard, and it's not really an encyclopedia's place to abandon it.) Ruakh 00:25, 21 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: About the opening line

message: By my reading of my grammar texts, Latin doesn't really have a fully functional passive future participle. The gerundive can be used as one in every case but the nominative - which is what the example on this page shows! Nominative 'educandus' can mean 'worthy of being taught' or 'able to be taught' but never 'about to be taught'; accusative 'educandum' could mean 'about to be taught' but would be misleading amongst the other nominatives in the list.
Not entirely clear whether the best thing to do is take the future passive out of the list for more explanation, leave it as is (technically incorrect but usefully explanatory) or just use a different case for that one example.
Mikolaj 04:13, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Latin passive future participle 

message: I come here, see some little things that are wrong, try2fix... then I come to notice more and more things that are wrong and ultimately i don't think it can be fixed.  'participle' is what you call a verb when you use it attributively somewhere, other than a VP C-commanded by a form of the verb 'be' where it belongs in predicative use... (and it is the verb 'be'.  and in italian, instead of saying 'the passengers have arrived', you say 'the passengers are arrived'... and then you can say, 'the arrived passengers'... like in english, you say 'the words have been spoken', and then you can say, 'the spoken words' (spoken is the past participle, not the past tense, the past tense being 'spoke' as in 'i spoke the words'... you get the forrm of the participle when C-commanded by 'be'))
dunno why i wrote that.  i want to fix the article, but i don't even know what to fix...
—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 72.19.73.110 (talk • contribs).
:I think that the article is mostly correct, and your comments do not help me see what you consider to be wrong in the article. Can you point out a specific statement in the article that, in your estimation, is not correct, and explain why? —RuakhTALK 23:02, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stupidest article ever 

message: This example doesn't mean what you think it should.  It turns out that, in English, left-branching structures go to the left of the noun, and right-branching structures go to the right.  Now, most structures in English are left-branching, and the single-word APs which include 'green' as in 'the green apple' are not exceptional in this regard.  Participles are /not/ adjectives, but single-word participle verb phrases are also considered left-branching, as in "the required documents".  But what about "the documents required"?
It turns out that you are permitted to randomly delete certain words from your sentences.  This is one example- 'the documents required' is an ellided version of 'the documents [that PRO are required]' (actually, i'm not sure... is that really PRO, or is it a trace?)
Now, I know you probably aren't going to take an 'it's ellided' argument seriously, especially after the whole 'better than [she is good]' debacle.  But try to say 'the that are required documents'... I'm guessing you had to try to make that-are-required into a single word to fit it in to the left of the noun.  The head of the relative clause, [that PRO are required], is of course 'that', making the structure right-branching and belonging on the right.
Here's an interesting participle verb phrase that will nicely illustrate my point about what goes to the left and what goes to the right- you can say 'the beautifully dancing man', or you can say 'the man dancing beautifully'.  Or you could, you know, say 'the man which is beautifully dancing'... thus 'the man beautifully dancing'... though that last one is a stretch, about as much of a stretch as 'the documents required'.
Here's the cliffs notes version, which doesn't much out this time.  Head comes last ->  put to the left.  Head comes first -> put to the right.
—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 72.19.73.110 (talk • contribs).
: It's not really just in English that left-branching structures go to the left and right-branching ones to the right.  OTOH, I've always seen your example sentence as containing an ellided [which is], as in please bring all the documents [which are] required. Wtrmute 19:00, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The article does not suggest any particular analysis. It points out a simple observation about how the surface position of participles is sometimes different from that of ordinary adjectives: "the documents required, the difficulties encountered" vs "*the documents important, *the difficulties major". Does anyone think that this needs to be modified in this article? CapnPrep 21:50, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Please bring all the documents required. 

message: I removed the Interlingua section. I think auxlangs and conlangs have no place in linguistic articles, unless they serve a very specific illustrational purpose, which in this case there wasn't at all. Jalwikip (talk) 09:29, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Even if they have native speaking populations? Michael Hardy (talk) 21:05, 17 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: The only auxlang that has claimed native speakers is Esperanto, and that has no native speaking population, but just some families that use the language as primary (or so its said). Also, it has no language development to speak of, and is still rigidly regulated. What's more important, auxlangs are made by linguists, based on linguistic principles. Using them to illustrate linguistic phenomena is therefore backwards, or circular, reasoning. Jalwikip (talk) 21:23, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

text: What do you mean by "language development"?  French, German, and most other major European languages are heavily regulated as well, but that doesn't exclude them from mention here.  What about the "linguistic phenomenon" of conditional participles in Esperanto, which were unplanned (and I suspect still officially disapproved of)? Michael Hardy (talk) 15:05, 21 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Interlingua 

message: This article uses far too much lingo, and it is impossible for anyone who is not knowledgable in linguistics to understand. Could someone who has worked on this article make it more accessible for non English graduates? Thanks --liquidGhoul (talk) 15:07, 10 May 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I found the same thing.  I was looking for a good example of a dangling participle, and as I started to get into the Polish part, I felt the similarity of this article to a medical report.  It must be difficult for a person with advanced knowlege, to just explain something in a simple way.  I've seen this too many times.  I have done it myself.  I don't know what to do about it.Longinus876 (talk) 13:52, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Lingo

message: Does not "seen...etc." strictly speaking modify the noun "problem", and not the main verb?
Paukum (talk) 08:53, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  modifying a verb or sentence, passive sense 

message: I've been looking around Wikipedia for a discussion of differing pronunciations of the -ing ending of present participles and have come up empty-handed.  Does anyone know where I missed something?  Specifically, I'm looking for info about social attitudes toward "dropping the g" at the end of present participles (i.e. using an alveolar nasal instead of a velar nasal) as well as if there is any variation by region. Anyone? Anyone? --Hraefen Talk 16:31, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: This is called, simply enough, "g-drop", and if you Google that phrase you'll probably get lots of journal articles and other discussions about it. Off the top of my head, I'd say that g-drop with the high-front 'ee' [i]sound in the nucleus would be regarded sociolinguistically as 'prestige' (the linguistic term for it) pronunciation, and high mid, lax, or schwah as 'lower-class', 'plain-regular-folks' pronunciation (Sarah Palin style: 'huntin' an 'fishin' an 'shootin'), or even syllabic 'n' with nasal-release and no vowel nucleus at all: 'huntn̩'. Sorry for the lack of proper IPA, I'm just passing through lookin for something else.JohndanR (talk) 04:01, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

text: 'g-drop', strangely enough is not really dropping anything because the 'g' is little more than a historical holdover from when the participial morpheme was actually sounding the '-g'. So the question about nasal or velar doesn't really apply: it is a rather unusual pronunciation for velar nasal for the '-ing' participles or gerunds in most English dialects; you might hear it idiolectically or maybe from second generation people of German descent or something, but '-ing' the grammatical morpheme is resolutely alveolar in most English, as '-ing' in a content-word is typically velar. E.g. 'bringing' has velar in the first, and frontal in the second '-ing'. JohndanR (talk) 04:16, 7 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Pronunciation in English

message: The table says take is a regular verb, but isn't it irregular since its past and perfect past participles aren't taked? —Ost (talk) 16:15, 11 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Except that shapen is also irregular. Regular past participles are formed with -ed. Talken doesn't exist and was vandalism as far as I can tell, but talk/talked/talked is fine as an example of a regular verb. --DrHacky (talk) 14:09, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Take

message: The section about Sireniki Eskimo should be clarified, since it doesn't make sense: '"If I were a marksman, I would kill walruses" requires two full clauses (in order to distinguish the two verbs' different subjects)' - the two verbs both have "I" as subject, so why are these 'different' subjects? Also, a translation into Sireniki would be nice. On the other hand, since it is appearently a dead language, this section can be deleted in its intirety without the article suffering. Jalwikip (talk) 20:59, 17 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I see the Sireniki page has the example using 'I' and 'we'. The page is very badly written though. Jalwikip (talk) 21:23, 17 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sireniki Eskimo 

message: I am an English speaker but I was taught grammar poorly at school. I searched "past participle" in the hope of learning to improve my grammar. Please excuse my French, but the entry is f...ing useless! It contains so much grammatical jargon that I learned nothing. 
Isn't Wikipedia meant to be helpful for everyone? It'd be great if someone added an understandable explanation to the entry.
:The section on participles in English seems pretty straightforward to me. What did you find confusing? — Gwalla | Talk 18:16, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unhelpful for someone not knowledgeable about grammar 

message: Done is ambiguous, because is frecuently used as Been in modern english, could the articule have any sign of the use of the word?Xopauxo wiki (talk) 10:00, 14 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Done 

message: Can anybody tell me about the history of English past participle, where it developed from, what its indoeuropen roots are? I would be interested.
Anyway, history of participles in different languages would worth writing about in the article. Only Latin-Neolatin development is evident. --Szipucsu (talk) 16:36, 3 December 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: As far as I can see there are only the references to some other languages as in gerund, adjectival participle and adverbial participle. Not terribly satisfying, I know, and certainly in need of further work on them, but that is all I can suggest. There is certainly plenty of scope for some enterprising and knowledgeable editors to complete the task in these articles. Dieter Simon (talk) 23:27, 3 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Historical approach 

message: "Broadly speaking, the project was successful"? Really wiki? A dangling participle on the page about participles?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.170.170.35 (talk) 10:46, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dangling Participle 

message: The intro paragraph is very ambiguous on the actual definition of a participle.  For convenience, I quote:  "In linguistics, a participle [...] can be a verb or an adjective (participial phrase). It is a derivative of a non-finite verb, which can be used in compound tenses or voices, or as a modifier. Participles often share properties with other parts of speech, in particular adjectives and nouns."
This tells us how a participle can function in a sentence, what a participle is related to, how it can be used (again), and what parts of speech participles are similar to.  It does not tell the definition of a participle or give any idea of what, in general, a participle is.  This might make a good second paragraph of the introduction, but as a first paragraph it left me hopelessly confused.
Since I came to this page looking to find out about participles because I didn't know what they were, I am unable to improve this.  Can someone who is knowledgeable about grammar or linguistics improve this paragraph? Augurar (talk) 08:38, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  What IS a participle? 

message: In Latin, the future participle is often translated into English as "to be about to."  (As in, "I'm about to leave" or "The game is about to start.") 
But what about the similar periphrases "I'm going to leave" or "The game is going to start?"  Are they also derived from the Latin future participle?  
Also, why is it that in Romance languages (for instance, Spanish) the "be" is dropped from the periphase? —eg. "Voy a irme." `I go to leave (sic)` or "El juego va a empezar." `The game goes to start (sic)` Pine (talk) 22:09, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Is the English periphrase "to be going to" related to the Latin future participle? 

message: This section seems to have degraded into a very short, unhelpful list of examples.  Without objection, I will create a new article on this topic, with a link to this section. Bearian (talk) 16:32, 11 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Participle#Modern_English]] 

message: Where the table is (around mid section) wouldn't the "to say", "to speak", etc. be considered infinitives? 
If not please disregard and remove. 
5rockhopper4 (talk) 03:26, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Infinitive mistake? 

message: Why are they called participles? • • • Peter (Southwood) (talk): 13:29, 18 July 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: It comes from a Latin word for "share", presumably because they share properties of both verbs and adjectives. W. P. Uzer (talk) 06:57, 19 July 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks, Wiktionary explains it quite well. • • • Peter (Southwood) (talk): 13:58, 19 July 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why? 

message: "I have eaten my dinner. (perfect construction; eaten is an active participle here)". – This seems to be a personal idea of the writer; there is no reference given to any textbook, and the statement seems dubious. It would mean that in "I'll have the work finished in a couple of minutes", "finished" is a passive participle, but in "I'll have finished the work in a couple of minutes", "finished" is an active participle; which is questionable. Certainly a past participle (or perfect participle) in English is sometimes active, but a better example would be "The tree has fallen down." Kanjuzi (talk) 06:59, 14 January 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Active and passive 

message: I have deleted the following little table from the section as it seems unnecessary:
legō"I read"	active  	passive
present     	legēns  	—
perfect     	—       	lēctus
future      	lēctūrus	legendus
However, if it is put back, no harm will be done.
I also replaced the verb amo with Donatus's example lego, since the meaning of amans is not typical of most other present participles. Kanjuzi (talk) 09:12, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Latin participle 

message: This important article is an almost unsalvageable mess. It exemplifies one of the worst features of the Wikipedia model: different editors with different levels of knowledge making random edits and insertions without regard to existing content or overall coherence.
The biggest problem is that English is treated in three different sections:
* A section entitled Types of Participles, which appears to have been written as a general introduction to participles but leans heavily on English.
* A section about Modern English in the Indo-European languages, which covers the way participles are used in English.
* A section entitled Usage in English (originally entitled Usage), which was inserted before the main part of the article without regard to the content of later sections. It includes a confusing table with a misleading column of tense names. 
As a result, overlap between sections is confusing in the extreme. The same points are repeated in different form and different order, embodying different narratives, at three different parts of the article. Some sections could be amalgamated to create a coherent narrative, but given the state of the article as it stands fixing it would be a lot of work. 
I will try to fix it at some stage but I don't expect that it will happen soon.
66.181.191.230 (talk) 02:23, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fixing the article 

message: I am astounded that an article about an important topic in linguistic typology should be rated as of Low importance. How can the importance rating be changed?
66.181.191.230 (talk) 02:28, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Importance: Low? 

message: As it stood, the article was highly confusing. I have carried out the following changes:
1. The lead has been rewritten to emphasise how the term 'participle' is used in many different functions across languages. The aim is to emphasise that the core meaning is 'verb acting as adjective' but that participles are used in many different ways. This will relieve the confusion that faces readers in trying to figure out exactly what a participle is.
2. The information about usage in English has been united under the section on Modern English. The earlier table of English usage has been moved here. This will hopefully help disentangle the peculiarities of English usage from the way that participles are used across different languages.
I am aware that the result is not ideal but it is a first step to making this into an introduction that will enlighten rather than confuse readers about what participles actually are.
Please feel free to improve the article, but please do not revert it to its previous tangled state.
Bathrobe (talk) 05:05, 21 February 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Revamping the article 

message: "The linguistic term, past participle, was coined circa 1798[6] based on its participial form, whose morphology equates to the regular form of preterite verbs. The term, present participle, was first used circa 1864[7] to facilitate grammatical distinctions". -- There is no source given for the claim that it is named after the preterite tense.  This seems to me to be a false claim.  Most grammarians would have been well aware that there are a fair number of verbs, including some very common ones, where the preterite and the past participle differ in form.  The term "coined" in misleading.  In Latin, the participles were already named after the tenses.  In Latin there's no "past" tense (there are perfect, imperfect and pluperfect tenses) - Donatus called the past participle "praeteritum", a term often rendered "past" in English.  In modern English we associate the term "preterite" exclusively with the simple past.  In older grammatical works all past tenses were all preterite, and the perfect (including present perfect) was regarded as a past tense.  In the 16th century the French past participle was called "the participall preterite" by an English writer, even though it bears no similarity to the French simple past.  So it was simply a fresh translation of the Latin form, not a true coinage, and it has nothing to do with what we call the preterite in English grammar today.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.197.29.82 (talk) 18:30, 6 March 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Coined "in English" is fairly obvious. More questions? Discuss it with the folks at Webster. I can't vouch for their research; I merely cited it. If you have something contrary that you can cite, please do so. --Kent Dominic·(talk) 20:23, 6 March 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dubious history 

message: Pinging @Kent Dominic and @Megaman en m as the content was originally added by an IP here.
The content itself seems to be basic stuff from a first- or possibly second-year course, definitely legit.
However, the transliterations are definitely nonstandard and confusing to English speakers due to their extreme strangeness. I had a look at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Hebrew), but my sleep deprived brain is having trouble doing the algorithm from scratch.
Btw, sourcing would probably be almost trivial with search engines. I’m multitasking already but if no one else does it I’ll try to come back and do it.
RadioactiveBoulevardier (talk) 07:33, 8 August 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Romanization issues in Hebrew subsection