Name: Advanced English Grammar: Participles
Uploaded: 2017-06-13T06:17:39.000Z
Duration: 13 min 56 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

In today's video we're going to look at participles.

Now, this is a little bit more advanced grammar, but it's very useful and it's used in everyday

speaking, but especially for writing and reading because you're going to see participles everywhere.

What participles do is they help you get sentence variety, they help you make your sentences

shorter, if necessary, they give you a little bit of style.

There are two participles that we need to look at, they are called the active or passive participle.

Sometimes you'll see them as present or past participle.

Sometimes they're called the verb three, so: "eat", past tense "ate", past participle is "eaten".

Now, especially with the "ing" you have to be careful because "ing" words, although they

are verbs with "ing", they can be pretty much anything.

They could be a gerund, as you know, so they're nouns; they could be part of the continuous

verb, so "be going", so: "I am going", it's a continuous action; but "ing" words can also

When they are adjectives and adverbs they are actually participles.

So it's very important to recognize them and know how to use them.

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...

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.

"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".

Now, if I rearrange the sentence, really, it says:

"The marine, who was dressed in his class-A uniform, looked like a recruitment poster."

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

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,

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.

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."

Because the subject here is "the village".

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

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

Okay, let's look at these examples now and you'll see the different positions the participles

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."

So what we're doing here, we're giving you a little bit more information about the musician.

We're giving you extra information, which is why we have the commas.

If this were a regular adjective clause, it would be a non-identifying adjective clause

"He is known" or "He was known", depending on the situation.

"Who was known", but whenever I have the relative pronoun of the adjective clause working also

as the subject, and I have a "be" verb, I can take them both out and leave only the

participle and whatever else comes with it.

If we have a participle and it's only the participle with nothing else after it, that

becomes the adjective and it goes before the noun, but I'll show you that after.

So this basically is telling you something about the musician, so it comes in the middle.

Now, in this sentence: "The woman talking to Jeff is his sister."

The woman who is talking to Jeff is his sister.

Now I'm identifying the woman, so I don't have a comma here because it's an identifying

adjective clause and I take out the relative pronoun subject, and again, the "be" verb.

You can make participles with other verbs beside the "be" verb, but we're going to look

For now this is just the basic structure, the basic way to make participles.

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Advanced English Grammar: Participles

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