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participles vs/and verb tenses

I am still not quite clear on how participles relate to verb tenses. There are charts showing the 12 verb tenses, but I have never seen a chart combining verb tenses and participles. I suppose that there is a good reason for this, but what is it? Put another way, shouldn't there be charts including both verb tenses and participles, so that you could see all of the possibilities in one place? Having two separate charts confuses things for me.

Re: participles vs/and verb tenses

you think of bananas

Re: participles vs/and verb tenses

The reason is that there is no connection between 'participle' and 'tense', other than the fact that participles are non-tensed verb-forms. Unlike the primary verb-forms, participles do not inflect for tense; when used alone they only figure in tenseless clauses called non-finite clauses which cannot stand alone.

Almost all lexical (i.e. non-auxiliary) verbs have a six-term paradigm, like this one for the verb "take":

Primary Forms

preterite: "took"
present: 3rd sing = "takes"; plain = "take"

Secondary forms

plain form: take
gerund-participle: taking
past participle: taken

Now consider these examples:

(1) I now see the problem.
(2) Having read the paper.
(3) Having read the paper, I now see the problem.

Ex(1) is a finite clause with the primary (tensed) verb-form "see" so it can stand alone as a well-formed sentence. By contrast, ex(2) has a secondary verb-form, the non-tensed present participle "having" and it cannot stand alone as a sentence. Ex(3) brings the two clauses together and the sentence is grammatical because it although it contains the non-tensed present participle "having", it also contains the tensed verb, "see".

Does that help?


PaulM