Participles in English: What are they and how are they used?

To form the present participle, just take the basic root of the verb and add -ing! It’s easy! For example:

There are two kinds of past participles in English: regular and irregular

• Regular participles have a predictable form: root + -ed:

  Root	Past participle
  dance	danced
  look	looked
  study	studied

• Irregular participles are a little trickier because they have forms that must be memorized.

  There are about 200 irregular verbs in English, and you can find their participles in the third column of most irregular verb lists:

  Root	Simple past	Past participle
  be	was / were	been
  cut	cut	cut
  have	had	had
  go	went	gone
  speak	spoke	spoken

In all three tenses (past, present, and future) participles are used to form verbs in the continuous and perfect aspects. To do this, each participle is used with a specific auxiliary (helping) verb: the present participle goes with auxiliary be and the past participle goes with the auxiliary have.

• Continous aspect:

  be + present participle

• Perfect aspect:

  have + past participle

Take a look at how this works in all three tenses!

A “classic” participle phrase is a participle phrase that is surrounded by commas and can only describe the subject of a sentence. These are often used in writing, but are less common in speech.

A classic participle phrase can come in three main places:

• At the beginning of the clause:

  participle phrasesubject

  Exhausted by the hike, Tom fell onto the sofa and groaned.

  Remembering to bring his lunch, Tom left the house.

• After the verb and object / at the end of the clause:

  subjectparticiple phrase

  Tom fell onto the sofa, exhausted by the hike.

  Tom left the house, remembering to bring his lunch.

• After the subject (uncommon):

  subjectparticiple phrase

  Tom, exhausted by the hike, fell onto the sofa.

  Tom, remembering to bring his lunch, left the house.

Notice that these participle phrases are always separated out by commas, and they always describe the subject.

A reduced relative clause can also begin with a participle, but these follow different grammar rules. This is because they are actually just English relative clauses with some words deleted. For example:

Recall that relative clauses in English are clauses (with a subject and a verb) that describe a noun.

If the verb in the relative clause is be and it is followed by a participle, you can delete the relative pronoun and the verb be. This is how we create reduced relative clauses that begin with participles!

But because reduced relative clauses are still relative clauses, they follow the rules that relative clauses follow. For example:

• Reduced relative clauses can describe any noun in the sentence, not just the subject:

  • Rita watched her neighbor cutting the grass.

    The neighbor cut the grass.
  • Rita bought a table made from wood.

    The table is made from wood.

• Reduced relative clauses always come right after the noun phrase they describe, but they do not need to be separated by commas.

  ❌ Cutting the grass, Rita watched her neighbor.

  This is only allowed if it is a classic participle phrase, describing Rita like the examples we saw above.

A dangling participle is a common writing error in English that happens when it is unclear which noun a participle phrase describes.

• Sometimes, this is because the noun the participle phrase describes is completely missing from the sentence:

  ❌ Walking in the garden, weeds sprouted everywhere.

  The weeds are walking in the garden?!?

  Fixing this is easy! Just make sure there is a subject in the sentence!

  ✅ Walking in the garden, Mary saw weeds everywhere.

  Now we know who was walking in the garden!

• Other times it happens because you are using a “classic” participle phrase without the proper punctuation (no commas), so it looks like it is a reduced relative clause!

  ❌ Tom watched the zebra sitting on the porch.

  Intended meaning: Tom was sitting on the porch. Tom saw a zebra.
  → Actual meaning: Tom saw a zebra. The zebra was sitting on the porch.

  This second kind of dangling participle is easy to fix in writing (just add the commas!) but it can be confusing in speech, because we cannot see the commas! Even in writing, it is better to rephrase a sentence like this, because they can confuse readers.

  If you want to be very clear, it is best to put a “classic” participle phrase close to the noun it describes, if you can!

  ✅ Sitting on the porch, Tom watched the zebra.

• A third kind of dangling participle comes about because a few English prepositions come from present participles. For example:

  Rita watched her neighbor using binoculars.

  This sentence is correct, but has two different meanings:

  1. If we read the word using as a participle, this is a reduced relative clauses, so the sentence means:

     Rita watched her neighbor who was using binoculars.

  2. But if we read the word using as a preposition, then the phrase using binoculars tells us how the watching happened instead. So the sentence means:

     Rita watched her neighbor by means of binoculars.

  To clarify sentences like these, it is best to just rephrase what you are trying to say!