Lesson 6: Relative Pronouns & More

Non-Finite Verbs

In previous lessons, we have briefly mentioned two slightly unusual verb forms: the participle and the infinitive. Participles and infinitives are non-finite verb forms (they do not inflect for tense and person within the sentence). Another way to think about them is that they are verb forms that can act as other parts of speech—like nouns, adjectives, and adverbs. What can be confusing about infinitives and participles is that they combine aspects of both verbs and the part of speech they take on.
These things will become more clear as we work through examples in the upcoming steps. But first, let’s unpack an important concept common to both infinitives and participles, and lay down some definitions.

Borrowed Subjects
It is important to understand that participles and infinitives have “borrowed” subjects. What does that mean? It means that they do not have their own subject as finite verbs do, but rather piggyback off the subject of whatever they are modifying. For example, consider these two sentences:

I will take this course to learn grammar.
I moved away from the talking students.


In the first sentence, the infinitive “to learn” is modifying the verb “will take” by telling us how the course will be taken—namely with a purpose: to learn. The subject of this infinitive is borrowed from the main verb. I will take the course so that I learn grammar.
In the second sentence, the participle “talking” is modifying “students.” Since “students” is a noun, it itself is the borrowed subject of “talking.” That is, the students are doing the talking.

Infinitives
in·​fin·​i·​tive

a special verb form that takes on the characteristics of both a verb and a noun; often referred to as a “verbal noun”
Infinitives are generally¹ easy to identify. Whenever you have the word “to” followed by a verb, you have found an infinitive.
While infinitives are verbal nouns, they will often function adverbially or adjectivally. You can see this in the example above where “to learn” is modifying the main verb and so acting adverbially. How then can it be a verbal noun? The answer is that, though it is functioning adverbially in this sentence, it is still in fact a thing—namely, the purpose for which I will take the course.

Participles
par·ti·ci·ple

a special verb form that takes on the characteristics of both a verb and an adjective (or adverb); often referred to as a “verbal adjective”
You may be familiar with thinking of participles as “-ing” words—that is, words ending in the letters -ing. The good news is that for the purposes of this course, we will really be keeping it that simple! This means that we will only consider the present participle form (e.g. “going”) and the helping verb-empowered participles (like “having gone” or “being called”) to be participles.² In a helping verb situation, the first helping verb will receive the -ing ending.

Past Participle
The past participle is also technically a type of participle in English, though we will treat it as a simple adjective in this course to keep things simple (e.g. “I turned in the finished³ homework”).⁴

¹ English also has a more rare and difficult type of infinitive to identify. We tell you about this type of infinitive in the next lesson.

² Often, English grammars will break apart such constructions. For example, “having gone” would be broken up into the present participle of “have” and the past participle of “go.” But, once again, we are considering grammar as translated from the original languages in this course. Thus, we treat “having gone” as a helping verb + verb combo in participle form since both words together would be translated from a single aorist participle in NT Greek.

³ The past participle takes the exact same form as the simple 1st person past tense.

⁴ In very rare cases, a past participle will be modified by a prepositional phrase or adverb. That is the only time when it will be problematic to diagram it simply as an adjective.