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Other terms that have been used to refer to converbs include adverbial participle, conjunctive participle, gerund, gerundive and verbal adverb (Ylikoski 2003). Converbs are differentiated from coverbs, verbs in complex predicates in languages that have the serial verb construction.
For all uses of specific perfect constructions, see the sections below on the present perfect, past perfect, future perfect, and conditional perfect. By using non-finite forms of the auxiliary have , perfect aspect can also be marked on infinitives (as in should have left and expect to have finished working ), and on participles and gerunds (as ...
A clause is often said to be the smallest grammatical unit that can express a complete proposition. [1] But this semantic idea of a clause leaves out much of English clause syntax. For example, clauses can be questions, [2]: 161 but questions are not propositions. [3] A syntactic description of an English clause is that it is a subject and a ...
The past participle of saw is normally sawn in BrE and sawed in AmE (as in sawn-off/sawed-off shotgun). [1]: 487 The past participle gotten is rarely used in modern BrE, which generally uses got except when fixed in old expressions such as ill-gotten gains and in the minority of dialects that retain the older form. The American dictionary ...
The other inflected parts of the verb – the third person singular present indicative in -[e]s, and the present participle and gerund form in -ing – are formed regularly in most cases. There are a few exceptions: the verb be has irregular forms throughout the present tense; the verbs have , do , and say have irregular -[e]s forms; and ...
The past participle is been, and the present participle and gerund is the regular being. The base form be is used regularly as an infinitive, imperative and (present) subjunctive. For archaic forms, see the next section. English has a number of modal auxiliary verbs which are defective.
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:
The following sentences illustrate some uses of gerund clauses, showing how such a clause serves as a noun within the larger sentence. In some cases, the clause consists of just the gerund (although in many such cases the word could equally be analyzed as a pure verbal noun). Swimming is fun. (gerund as subject of the sentence) I like swimming.