Participles, as the earlier blog suggested, can be tough cookies. But a little milk takes care of some of that, so let's go after them like a two-year-old goes after an Oreo. And who knows? Maybe we'll even find something tasty in them yet.
Participles belong to that vast, unwashed category of words called verbals. Sometimes we want to call them something else entirely, but let vocabulary be what may and try to understand it. Though actually nouns or adjectives, this ill-mannered gang carry with them certain roles we generally think of as verbs. First, they usually do/did something (like loving, hitting, jumped, or killed). We commonly think this makes them verbs, but for the time being you must trust me they are wholly incapable of doing a verb's job as is. Second, participles show some characteristic of the action. It either is ongoing--we call that progressive--or it is finished--that's called perfect. Think of the words I used: ongoing and finished. You can see how we express that aspect. Third, they tell us when this activity happened. Well, sort of. Like we tell our parents when we arrived home from the "study session" at our friends house. Context is everything, right? And finally, they indicate how that action is viewed--it either goes out (active--loving) or comes back (passive--loved). Remember our illustration from class: the killing chicken vs the killed chicken. Be sure to cook it all the way!
Yes, a dense paragraph, but hopefully it makes some things clear: participles show an event with some aspect of completion or progression occurring at some relative time while its voice declares whether it did the action or had it done back.
Whew. That was a lot to bite off at one time. And what started off like a cookie tastes more like chicken now. I hope its fully cooked.
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