Cross-linguistic variation
Whilst English verbs only have two distinct PARTICIPIAL forms – the past participle and the present participle – many other languages, such as Basque, American and Lezgian, have several more. Verbal categories such as tense and aspect can also be realized on participles: in Lezgian there are past tense and future tense participles as well as participles with perfect aspect aspect. (16) illustrates the future participle, a form of the verb ‘play’:
(16) ‘That friend wants to take away the drum that I will play today at the concert.’
Not all languages use participles in conjunction with a finite verb. Example (16) has a relative clause (see Section 3.4) ‘the drum that I will play today at the concert’ with no finite verb, just the future participle – a form with no person and number markers. Similar examples from English are the woman just arriving or the slide seen on the screen now. In (17), the main (‘realized’) clause, in square brackets (see Section 3.2) has only a past participle, and no finite verb, whilst the English translation has finite knew:
It can even be the case that a language has only a CLOSED class of finite verbs, but has an OPEN class of participles; in the Australian language Wakiman, the finite verb class has only around 35 members, whilst participles are a genuinely open class of verbs (Cook 1988)