Past participle is the name of a verbal form.
The past participle is a verbal form that allows you to create a subordinate clause , perform the conjugation of the passive voice or apply a qualification to a noun. Some examples of participles are "purchased" ( "I have already bought a number for this year's raffle" ), "interpreted" ( "The text has been interpreted by a very talented Portuguese actor" ) and "stolen" ( "The play stolen was valued at half a million euros » ).
The past is that which has already happened and that, chronologically, is left behind. The past is the past , what has already been lived; The present, on the other hand, is the current time, while what is to come is part of the future.
Participle , a term originating from the Latin word participium , is a concept that is used in grammar to name the verb that appears with an impersonal form, so it can be influenced by number and gender. In the Spanish language , the participle is always past.
About the past participle
As a curious fact, the participle noun is given as a result of its "participation" in both the function of adjective and verb, although it simply maintains nuances in the latter. As indicated in the previous paragraph, current Spanish only recognizes the participle that denotes an action from the past, regardless of the distance it maintains with the present; For this reason, until a few years ago, the RAE dictionary called it a passive or preterite participle.
On the other hand, many of the words ending in -nte that today are simply considered adverbs, prepositions, nouns or adjectives (such as quite, during, singer and alarming, respectively) usually have Latin origins and belong to the set of participles. active or present , since its ending tends to denote the action from a grammatical point of view.
Latin recognizes four types of participle, among which is the present , just mentioned, along with one of the past and two of the future . The first is classified as active and it is possible to say that it is reflected in our gerund and, less frequently , in the active participle; Its name indicates that it is formed from verbs conjugated in the present, to which various endings are added.
The Latin past participle is considered passive and in our language it is what we simply define as a participle, as explained in the previous paragraphs. Finally, the future participle is divided into active and passive, depending on the type of action that gives it its value .
The past participle has different characteristics depending on the language.
Its use in Spanish and English
In Spanish, the absolute participle is also recognized, which is characterized by being within a subordinate construction and having its own subject, different from the main subject of the sentence , with which it agrees exclusively. Let's look at some examples: «The professor, having finished his presentation, picked up his things and left with the frustration of not having been able to connect with the students» , «After the concert, the orchestra was applauded for several minutes and several members of the audience stood up. They approached with beautiful bouquets of flowers .
In the English language , the past participle is known as past participle . It is a compound verb form , which implies the inclusion of an auxiliary verb next to the main verb. The auxiliary verbs in English are "have" and "to be" .
A sentence with a past participle could be the following: " My cousin has bought this house." Other examples are "I have been there for a while, " "This product was manufactured in 1974, " and "This song was written almost four decades." ago but it's still popular."