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Non-finite verbs, are verb forms that do not show tense,
Here the verb catena contains three main verbs so there are three separate predicates in the verb catena.
The three examples show distinctions between finite and non-finite verbs and the roles of these distinctions in sentence structure. For example, non-finite verbs can be auxiliary verbs or main verbs and they appear as infinitives, participles, gerunds etc.
Syntactic theory and the structure of English: A minimalist approach
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. *Rozakis, L. 2003. The complete idiot's guide to grammar and style, 2nd Edition''. Alpha. ISBN *Tallerman, M. 1998. Understanding syntax. London: Arnold. *Ylikoski, J. 2003
"Defining non-finites: action nominals, converbs and infinitives."
''SKY Journal of Linguistics'' 16: 185–237.
Verbals: Gerunds, Participles, and Infinitives
{{Authority control Verb types
person
A person (: people or persons, depending on context) is a being who has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations suc ...
, or number
A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The most basic examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers can ...
. They include:
# Infinitives (e.g., to go, to see) - They often function as nouns or the base form of a verb
# Gerunds (e.g., going, seeing) - These act as nouns but are derived from verbs
# Participles (e.g., gone, seen) - These can function as adjectives or part of verb tenses (like has gone)
Nonfinite verbs are used in constructions where there's no need to express tense directly. They help in creating sentences like "I want to go," where "to go" is nonfinite.
In the English language
English is a West Germanic language that developed in early medieval England and has since become a English as a lingua franca, global lingua franca. The namesake of the language is the Angles (tribe), Angles, one of the Germanic peoples th ...
, a non-finite verb cannot perform action as the main verb of an independent clause. Non-finite verb forms in some other languages include converb
In theoretical linguistics, a converb ( abbreviated ) is a nonfinite verb form that serves to express adverbial subordination: notions like 'when', 'because', 'after' and 'while'. Other terms that have been used to refer to converbs include ''adv ...
s, gerundive
In Latin grammar, a gerundive () is a verb form that functions as a verbal adjective.
In Classical Latin, the gerundive has the same form as the gerund, but is distinct from the present active participle. In Late Latin, the differences were lar ...
s and supine
In grammar, a supine is a form of verbal noun used in some languages. The term is most often used for Latin, where it is one of the four principal parts of a verb. The word refers to a position of lying on one's back (as opposed to ' prone', l ...
s. The categories of mood, tense, and or voice
The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal tract, including talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, shouting, humming or yelling. The human voice frequency is specifically a part of human sound produ ...
may be absent from non-finite verb forms in some languages.
Because English lacks most inflectional morphology, the finite and the non-finite forms of a verb may appear the same in a given context.
Examples
In the following sentences, the non-finite verbs are emphasized, while the finite verbs are underlined. :: Verbs appear in almost all sentences. :: This sentence is illustrating finite and non-finite verbs. :: The dog will have to be trained well. :: Tom promised to try to do the work. ::The case has been intensively examined today. ::What did they want to have done about that? ::Someone tried to refuse to accept the offer. ::Coming downstairs, she saw the man running away. ::I am trying to get the tickets. In the above sentences, ''been'', ''examined'' and ''done'' are past participles, ''want'', ''have'', ''refuse'', ''accept'' and ''get'' are infinitives, and ''coming'', ''running'' and ''trying'' are present participles (for alternative terminology, see the sections below). In languages like English that have little inflectional morphology, certain finite and non-finite forms of a given verb are often identical, e.g. ::a. They laugh a lot. - Finite verb (present tense) in bold ::b. They will laugh a lot. - Non-finite infinitive in bold ::a. Tom tried to help. - Finite verb (past tense) in bold ::b. Tom has tried to help. - Non-finite participle in bold Despite the fact that the verbs in bold have the same outward appearance, the first in each pair is finite and the second is non-finite. To distinguish the finite and non-finite uses, one has to consider the environments in which they appear. Finite verbs in English usually appear as the leftmost verb in a verb catena. For details of verb inflection in English, seeEnglish verbs
Verbs constitute one of the main Part of speech, parts of speech (word classes) in the English language. Like other types of words in the language, English verbs are not heavily inflection, inflected. Most combinations of Grammatical tense, tense ...
.
Categories
English
In English, a non-finite verb form may constitute: * aninfinitive
Infinitive ( abbreviated ) is a linguistics term for certain verb forms existing in many languages, most often used as non-finite verbs that do not show a tense. As with many linguistic concepts, there is not a single definition applicable to all ...
verb, including the auxiliary verb
An auxiliary verb ( abbreviated ) is a verb that adds functional or grammatical meaning to the clause in which it occurs, so as to express tense, aspect, modality, voice, emphasis, etc. Auxiliary verbs usually accompany an infinitive verb or ...
''have''
:# within a verb phrase that is predicated by a modal verb (e.g., "I could ''have'' cried").
:# within a to-infinitive phrase (e.g., "They seem to ''have'' moved").
* a participle
In linguistics, a participle (; abbr. ) is a nonfinite verb form that has some of the characteristics and functions of both verbs and adjectives. More narrowly, ''participle'' has been defined as "a word derived from a verb and used as an adject ...
.
* a gerund
In linguistics, a gerund ( abbreviated ger) is any of various nonfinite verb forms in various languages; most often, but not exclusively, it is one that functions as a noun. The name is derived from Late Latin ''gerundium,'' meaning "which is ...
.
Each of the non-finite forms appears in a variety of environments.
Infinitive
The infinitive form of a verb is considered the canonical form listed in dictionaries. English infinitives appear in verb catenae if they are introduced by an auxiliary verb or by a certain limited class of main verbs. They are also often introduced by a main verb followed by the particle ''to'' (as illustrated in the examples below). Further, infinitives introduced by ''to'' can function as noun phrases or even as modifiers of nouns. The following table illustrates such environments: :::Participle
English participles can be divided along two lines: according to aspect (progressive vs. perfect/perfective) andvoice
The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal tract, including talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, shouting, humming or yelling. The human voice frequency is specifically a part of human sound produ ...
(active vs. passive). The following table illustrates the distinctions:
:::
Participles appear in a variety of environments. They can appear in periphrastic verb catenae, when they help form the main predicate of a clause, as is illustrated with the trees below. Also, they can appear essentially as an adjective modifying a noun. The form of a given perfect or passive participle is strongly influenced by the status of the verb at hand. The perfect and the passive participles of strong verbs in Germanic languages
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania, and Southern Africa. The most widely spoke ...
are irregular (e.g. ''driven'') and must be learned for each verb. The perfect and passive participles of weak verbs, in contrast, are regular and are formed with the suffix ''-ed'' (e.g. ''fixed'', ''supported'', ''opened'').
Gerund
A gerund is a verb form that appears in positions that are usually reserved for nouns. In English, a gerund has the same form as a progressive active participle and so ends in ''-ing''. Gerunds typically appear as subject or object noun phrases or even as the object of a preposition: ::: Often, distinguishing between a gerund and a progressive active participle is not easy in English, and there is no clear boundary between the two non-finite verb forms.Auxiliary verb
Auxiliary verbs typically occur as finite verbs, but they also can occur as a participle (e.g. ''been'', ''being'', ''got'', ''gotten'', or ''getting'') or, in the case of ''have'', in a non-finite context as the complement to a modal verb relating to a perfect tense, e.g.: :::Native American languages
Some languages, including manyNative American languages
The Indigenous languages of the Americas are the languages that were used by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas Pre-Columbian era, before the arrival of non-Indigenous peoples. Over a thousand of these languages are still used today, while m ...
, form non-finite constructions by using nominalized verbs.Mithun, Marianne. 1999. The languages of Native America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Others do not have any non-finite verbs. Where most European and Asian languages use non-finite verbs, Native American languages tend to use ordinary verb forms.
Modern Greek
The non-finite verb forms inModern Greek
Modern Greek (, or , ), generally referred to by speakers simply as Greek (, ), refers collectively to the dialects of the Greek language spoken in the modern era, including the official standardized form of the language sometimes referred to ...
are identical to the third person of the ''dependent'' (or aorist subjunctive) and it is also called the ''aorist infinitive''. It is used with the auxiliary verb έχω (to have) to form the perfect, the pluperfect and the future perfect tenses.
Theories of syntax
For an overview ofdependency grammar
Dependency grammar (DG) is a class of modern Grammar, grammatical theories that are all based on the dependency relation (as opposed to the ''constituency relation'' of Phrase structure grammar, phrase structure) and that can be traced back prima ...
structure in modern linguistic
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
analysis, three example sentences are shown. The first sentence, ''The proposal has been intensively examined'', is described as follows.
::
The three verbs together form a chain, or verb catena (in purple), which functions as the predicate of the sentence. The finite verb ''has'' is inflected for person and number, tense, and mood: third person singular, present tense, indicative. The non-finite verbs ''been'' and ''examined'' are, except for tense, neutral across such categories and are not inflected otherwise. The subject, ''proposal'', is a dependent of the finite verb ''has'', which is the root (highest word) in the verb catena. The non-finite verbs lack a subject dependent.
The second sentence shows the following dependency structure:
::
The verb catena (in purple) contains four verbs (three of which are non-finite) and the particle ''to'', which introduces the infinitive ''have''. Again, the one finite verb, ''did'', is the root of the entire verb catena and the subject, ''they'', is a dependent of the finite verb.
The third sentence has the following dependency structure:
::
Here the verb catena contains three main verbs so there are three separate predicates in the verb catena.
The three examples show distinctions between finite and non-finite verbs and the roles of these distinctions in sentence structure. For example, non-finite verbs can be auxiliary verbs or main verbs and they appear as infinitives, participles, gerunds etc.
See also
*Balancing and deranking In linguistics, balancing and deranking are terms used to describe the form of verbs used in various types of subordinate clauses and also sometimes in co-ordinate constructions.
* A verb form is said to be balanced if it is identical to forms use ...
* Converb
In theoretical linguistics, a converb ( abbreviated ) is a nonfinite verb form that serves to express adverbial subordination: notions like 'when', 'because', 'after' and 'while'. Other terms that have been used to refer to converbs include ''adv ...
* Gerundive
In Latin grammar, a gerundive () is a verb form that functions as a verbal adjective.
In Classical Latin, the gerundive has the same form as the gerund, but is distinct from the present active participle. In Late Latin, the differences were lar ...
* Grammatical conjugation
In linguistics, conjugation ( ) is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection (alteration of form according to rules of grammar). For instance, the verb ''break'' can be conjugated to form the words ''break'' ...
* Infinitive
Infinitive ( abbreviated ) is a linguistics term for certain verb forms existing in many languages, most often used as non-finite verbs that do not show a tense. As with many linguistic concepts, there is not a single definition applicable to all ...
* Lexical categories, commonly known as parts of speech
In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech (abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are as ...
* Participle
In linguistics, a participle (; abbr. ) is a nonfinite verb form that has some of the characteristics and functions of both verbs and adjectives. More narrowly, ''participle'' has been defined as "a word derived from a verb and used as an adject ...
* Supine
In grammar, a supine is a form of verbal noun used in some languages. The term is most often used for Latin, where it is one of the four principal parts of a verb. The word refers to a position of lying on one's back (as opposed to ' prone', l ...
* Verb phrase
In linguistics, a verb phrase (VP) is a syntax, syntactic unit composed of a verb and its argument (linguistics), arguments except the subject (grammar), subject of an independent clause or coordinate clause. Thus, in the sentence ''A fat man quic ...
* Verbal noun
Historically, grammarians have described a verbal noun or gerundial noun as a verb form that functions as a noun. An example of a verbal noun in English is 'sacking' as in the sentence "The ''sacking'' of the city was an epochal event" (wherein ...
References
Sources
*Dodds, J. 2006. The ready reference handbook, 4th Edition. Pearson Education, Inc.. *Finch, G. 2000. Linguistic terms and concepts. New York: St. Martin's Press. *Radford, A. 1997Syntactic theory and the structure of English: A minimalist approach
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. *Rozakis, L. 2003. The complete idiot's guide to grammar and style, 2nd Edition''. Alpha. ISBN *Tallerman, M. 1998. Understanding syntax. London: Arnold. *Ylikoski, J. 2003
"Defining non-finites: action nominals, converbs and infinitives."
''SKY Journal of Linguistics'' 16: 185–237.
External links
*Owl Online Writing Lab ArchiveVerbals: Gerunds, Participles, and Infinitives
{{Authority control Verb types