Lesson 8 | Digging Deeper into Verbal Phrases, Part 2
Participle Phrases
In Lesson 7, we divided up the nine different types of phrases you learned in Lesson 1 into two families: verbal and nonverbal. Then we dug deeper into the details of the first two types of verbal phrases: unmarked phrases and conjunction phrases.
The third type of verbal phrase is a participle phrase. This is simply a phrase with a participle that modifies a verb. So what is a participle? Without getting super grammatical, look for a word that ends in “-ing.” Not all of them are participles; regular verbs can end in “-ing” too, and so can nouns, so be careful! A good way to figure out if a word is a participle is by taking the “-ing” off the end of the word. If you’re left with a regular verb, than you have a participle.
In English, an adverbial participle phrase modifies a verb. For instance, look at the following participle phrases in the following passage of Scripture, Ephesians 2:1-3, which are marked in bold.
And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
Both occurrences of the participle “following” modify the verb “walked” in verse 2, and the participle “carrying” modifies the verb “lived” in verse 3.
We will split off every participle phrase onto a new line. Then we will label the particular relationship it has with its anchor phrase.
On the Phrasing Relationships cheat sheet, there are four major relationships that a participle phrase can have with its anchor phrase, marked with the symbol “Pa.” Let’s briefly explore each relationship below, with scriptural examples to aid your understanding.
The reason why Paul thanked God for the Thessalonians was because he remembered their work of faith, labor of love, and steadfastness of hope.
The result of Jesus’ teaching in the synagogues was that everyone praised him.
It can be tricky to distinguish between Manner and Means, especially when you first start thinking about these two relationships, for both answer the question, “How?” Here is the main distinction between them: a participle of Means contains a necessary part of the action of the main verb, whereas a participle of Manner describes the style of the action. Another way to put it is that a participle of Means describes the instrument used to perform the action, while a participle of Manner simply accompanies the action.
Perhaps an example will help: If I say, “I knocked on the door loudly,” that is a participle of Manner, because it describes the style of my knocking; it accompanies the action of knocking. But if I said, “I knocked on the door with my fist,” that is the usage of Means, because I couldn’t knock on the door without my fist; my fist is a necessary part of the action of knocking.
Here, Wisdom describes his daily emotion when God was creating the world; the style of his dwelling with God was “rejoicing”; his dwelling with God was accompanied by “rejoicing.”
A participle of means usually “makes more explicit what the author intended to convey with the main verb,” such that if you removed the participle phrase, “the point of the main verb is removed as well,” which “is not normally true with manner” (Wallace, 629). If you can insert the phrase “by means of” in front of the participle, then you have a participle of Means.
In this case, the way you humble yourself, the instrument used in self-humbling instead of being proud, is casting your anxieties on the Lord.