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The Arabic verb has two participles: an active participle (ʾism al-fāʿil اسم الفاعل) and a passive participle (ʾism al-mafʿūl اسم المفعول), and the form of the participle is predictable by inspection of the dictionary form of the verb. These participles are inflected for gender, number and case, but not person.
The term form class is also used, although this has various conflicting definitions. [4] Word classes may be classified as open or closed: open classes (typically including nouns, verbs and adjectives) acquire new members constantly, while closed classes (such as pronouns and conjunctions) acquire new members infrequently, if at all.
A phrase typically serves the same function as a word from some particular word class. [3] For example, my very good friend Peter is a phrase that can be used in a sentence as if it were a noun, and is therefore called a noun phrase.
It may be used as a simple adjective: as a passive participle in the case of transitive verbs (the written word, i.e. "the word that is written"), and as a perfect active participle in the case of some intransitive ones (a fallen tree, i.e. "a tree that has fallen"). The present participle has the following uses:
Verb phrases generally are divided among two types: finite, of which the head of the phrase is a finite verb; and nonfinite, where the head is a nonfinite verb, such as an infinitive, participle or gerund. Phrase structure grammars acknowledge both types, but dependency grammars treat the subject as just another verbal dependent, and they do ...
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 ...
In Latin, most verbs have four principal parts.For example, the verb for "to carry" is given as portō – portāre – portāvī – portātum, where portō is the first-person singular present active indicative ("I carry"), portāre is the present active infinitive ("to carry"), portāvī is the first-person singular perfect active indicative ("I carried"), and portātum is the neuter supine.
Some languages, such as English and Spanish, use a periphrastic passive voice; that is, it is not a single word form, but rather a construction making use of other word forms. Specifically, it is made up of a form of the auxiliary verb to be and a past participle of the main verb which carries the lexical content of the predicate.