Advanced English Grammar: Participles

TRANSCRIPT

So what I want to do first is I want to look at the adjective participles. Now, what you have to remember about adjective participles, they are... They are reduced adjective clauses. You know an adjective clause, it's meant to modify a noun. It identifies it or gives extra information about a noun. A participle, an adjective participle is that adjective clause minus the subject and the verb. Okay? But we're going to look at that in a second.

So let's look at this sentence first. Oh, sorry, let me... I made a little mistake here. "Dressed in his class-A uniform, the marine looked like a recruitment poster." So this is the passive or the past participle ending in "ed", it's a regular verb, so: "dressed". "Dressed in his class-A uniform". Now, if I rearrange the sentence, really, it says: "The marine, who was dressed in his class-A uniform, looked like a recruitment poster." Okay? Like a poster that wants people to join the marines, etc. But I can take that adjective clause, I get rid of the "who was" or "who is", depending on the tense. Get rid of that, and I'm left with a participle phrase. Now, I can take that participle phrase and move it to the beginning of the sentence, just like I have here. The key when you're using participles at the beginning... A participle phrase at the beginning of a sentence, you must make sure that the subject, which is not there but it is understood: who was, who is the marine, so the marine who was dressed in his class-A, and then the subject of the independent clause must be the same subject. Okay? We're going to look at a couple more examples.

"Standing near the window, Marie could see the entire village." Look at the other example: "Standing near the window, the entire village was in view." Now, many people will look at both sentences and think: "Yeah, okay, I understand them. They're both correct." This sentence is incorrect. Why? Because the subject here is "the village". Can the village stand near the window? No, it can't. So: "Standing near the window" means Marie. "Marie, who was standing near the window, could see the entire village." This subject cannot do this action, so you have to make sure that the implied or the understood subject in the participle is the exact same as the subject of the independent clause that follows it. Okay? That's very, very important. So now what we're going to do, I'm going to look at a few more examples and I want to show you that you can start the sentence with a participle phrase, but you can also leave it in the middle of the sentence. Okay? Let's look at that.

Okay, let's look at these examples now and you'll see the different positions the participles can take. And again, we're talking about participle phrases for the most part. "The jazz musician, known for his tendency to daydream, got into a zone and played for an hour straight." Okay? […]

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