Grammatical Summary

Confusion Between Verbs and Other Forms

Students frequently exhibit confusion in distinguishing between a word that is serving as a true verb in a sentence and a word that looks like and is based on a verb, but which has a different function. Confusion in understanding this distinction causes students to write erroneous sentences such as "I am frustrating."

Participles

Participles are derived from verbs and have the form VERB-ing or VERB-ed (sometimes VERB-en, etc.), and they serve either of two functions. Paired with an auxiliary verb, the verb formation containing a participle expresses an action or state, as explained previously:

As a single word, the participle acts as an ADJECTIVE to add information to a noun phrase. In the following sentence, the participle smiling describes the subject noun phrase the man. The main verb of the sentence, received, is not a participle.

In the next sentence, the participle frustrated functions as an ADJECTIVE to describe the mental state of the subject noun phrase citizens. The main verb in the sentence is protest.

-ING Participles

The -ing participle standing alone cannot serve as the complete, independent verb of a sentence because it does not indicate tense, as in:

In this example, working is not a complete verb because we do not know the time (tense) of the action. It could be past, present or future:

Time (tense) is indicated by the helping verb. The -ing participle alone cannot be the complete verb because it does not indicate the time of the action.

Some teachers refer to the -ing participle as the "present participle," but you can see from the examples above that the term is misleading.

-ED Participles

The -ed participle is identical in form to the simple -ed past tense form of regular verbs. In the following sentence, worked serves as a complete verb in the simple past tense and is not a participle.

In this sentence, worked expresses both the action and the time of the action (simple past). It meets both conditions required to be the main verb. However, the fact that the -ed past tense and the -ed participle are identical in form is a major source of confusion for students.