Hi everyone,
It might take long. Just to give all the antecedents before asking. Thanks!
Apart from participles used to make perfect tenses and passive voice structures, they are also used to modify nouns acting either before or after them as participle adjectives or participle phrases respectively. So, where putting participles might indicate their function as an adjective or post-noun modifier.
My question so, how to decide when participles act as adjectives (participle adjective) or as post-noun modifiers (participle phrases)? Here some examples changing their order to ask what's the correct use.
Example 1: Past participle adjective
1. If you do not want to specify the required information, you will not be able to terminate the transaction.
2. If you do not want to specify the information required, you will not be able to terminate the transaction.
Please consider that the first sentence uses required information, and the second one information required. I took the first sentence from an English-speaking website, and I modified the second one using past participle after the noun. Is that OK? Is this second phrase information required a past-participle one given that I am using the participle after the noun?
Example 2: Past-participle phrase
1. The information required in the declarations should be specified according to a format prepared for this purpose by the inspection agency.
2. The required information in the declarations should be specified according to a prepared format for this purpose by the inspection agency.
Again, the first sentence is pure English (taken from an English-speaking website), and for the second one, I shifted the order of the past-participle acting this time as an adjective (before the noun).
So what's the difference between:
information required (first sentence) v/s required information (second sentence).
format prepared (first sentence) v/s prepared format (second sentence).
Please, could someone kindly explain when a participle is used either as an adjective or as a past participle phrase? Can we invert they position?
Thank you!
Participle phrases and participle adjectives
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alquezad
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Alan
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Re: Participle phrases and participle adjectives
A very reasonable question, but one to which there is, unfortunately, no very straightforward answer!
The ability to place a participle before its noun (i.e. to treat it as an adjective) depends on both the -ing or -ed form itself and the noun to be modified. ‘Sitting’, for example is normally not preposed, i.e. we say
There was a man sitting in the park.
And not
*There was a sitting man in the park.
And yet we may, for example, speak of ‘a sitting tenant’ (meaning one with a long-established residency).
In such cases, the preposed (adjectival) form often has a metaphorical rather than a literal meaning, but there is no way to predict with certainty that a metaphorical usage will automatically permit the adjectival word-order, or, for that matter, that a simple, literal meaning will prohibit it, since we may speak of ‘a crying baby’ to mean simply ‘a baby (that is) crying’.
Your only safe guide in this matter is a good learners’ dictionary such as Collins Cobuild (also available online), which will generally carry that kind of information, and, if in doubt, simply to postpose the participial form, which, although it might occasionally result in a slightly unnatural expression, will rarely be incorrect.
Good luck!
The ability to place a participle before its noun (i.e. to treat it as an adjective) depends on both the -ing or -ed form itself and the noun to be modified. ‘Sitting’, for example is normally not preposed, i.e. we say
There was a man sitting in the park.
And not
*There was a sitting man in the park.
And yet we may, for example, speak of ‘a sitting tenant’ (meaning one with a long-established residency).
In such cases, the preposed (adjectival) form often has a metaphorical rather than a literal meaning, but there is no way to predict with certainty that a metaphorical usage will automatically permit the adjectival word-order, or, for that matter, that a simple, literal meaning will prohibit it, since we may speak of ‘a crying baby’ to mean simply ‘a baby (that is) crying’.
Your only safe guide in this matter is a good learners’ dictionary such as Collins Cobuild (also available online), which will generally carry that kind of information, and, if in doubt, simply to postpose the participial form, which, although it might occasionally result in a slightly unnatural expression, will rarely be incorrect.
Good luck!