A reader, Ms. Clara Tong, e-mailed me last week after coming across a long-ago column of mine extolling the virtues of the absolute phrase. She said: “My question may sound strange, but I certainly hope you can answer it. I discovered your article today through Google and I enjoyed it immensely. I can’t agree with you more when you said that ‘a major virtue of absolute phrases is that they can neatly and efficiently wrap telling details into sentences.’ But in that column, you made a reference to a ‘true finite verb.’ What did you mean by that?”

Going over that column again, I saw at once what had mystified Clara. But let me backtrack a little to put my answer in better perspective. In that column, I described the absolute phrase as a unique grammatical form that consists of a participle and a noun or pronoun that it modifies. I pointed out that unlike the other kinds of phrases, an absolute phrase does not directly connect to the rest of the sentence or modify a specific word in that sentence; instead, it functions as an independent parenthetical element modifying the whole sentence: “Her heart brimming with joy, the winner extended a reconciliatory arm to her political enemies.” “Their egos stung by defeat, the losers vowed never to concede.” “The bitterly fought election [being] over, the nation braced itself for the tough times ahead.” The absolute phrase can neatly give a sentence context and texture, but it can be knocked off and the sentence can still stand by itself.

Another distinguishing feature of an absolute phrase, I observed in that column, is that it contains a subject (“her heart,” “their egos,” and “the bitterly fought election” in the sentences above) but not a true finite verb. Instead of a finite verb, I said, it uses a participle (“brimming with joy,” “stung by defeat,” “being over”) to modify that subject. The problem is that I did not elaborate on what a “finite verb” and a “non-finite verb” were. Only after reading Clara’s e-mail, in fact, did I realize that I should have made a clear distinction between them.

So, better late than never, I am doing so now. 

A “verb,” as we all know, is a word that serves as the grammatical center of a predicate and expresses an act, occurrence, or state of being. It is “finite” if it actually shows tense (past, present, or future), person (first person, second person, or third person), and number (singular or plural). Here are sentences that use finite verb forms expressing an act or occurrence: “I run.” “He runs.” “We ran.” And here are sentences that use different forms of the linking verb “be” to express a state of being: “I am hungry.” “She was hungry.” “They were hungry.” All of these verbs have duration, meaning that they happen at some point in time, and they change in form (inflect) depending on tense, person, and number; in short, they are functioning as “true” verbs. 

In contrast, a verb becomes “non-finite” when it assumes a form that has no duration and cannot take tense, person, and number. We can liken “non-finite verbs” to actions that congealed as they were taking place, as in a freeze-framed scene from a movie. They become what are known in grammar as the verbals. The verb “take,” for instance, can assume the non-finite forms “to take” (infinitive), “taking” (gerund), and “taken” (participle)—forms that no longer function as verbs but serve as nouns or adjectives instead.  

Let’s look closer at how these non-finite verbs work. As an infinitive phrase (noun): “To take her hand would not be advisable.” “I have never wanted to take her place.” Gerund phrase (noun): “Taking her hand would not be advisable.” “I have never considered taking her place.” Past or present participle (adjective): “The taken seat was the cause of their quarrel.” “Taking seats without permission is impolite.” 

Now I am ready to answer Clara’s question about what I meant by “true finite verb.” In my column on absolute phrases, I used the qualifier “true” for “finite verbs” because it so happens that in English, one of the verb forms—the one that ends with the suffix –ing—can either be a “true” finite verb or a non-finite one depending on how it is used. It is a true finite verb when used in the progressive tense, as in “She is bluffing about the whole thing.” It is not a true finite verb but a non-finite verb when used as a gerund, as in “Bluffing is her forte.” In fact, we can only be sure that a verb form ending in –ing is a finite verb—is “true”—and not a non-finite verb by checking if it really works as a verb in a sentence. (July 5, 2004)

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, July 5, 2004, © 2004 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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A reader of The Manila Times who identified herself as a first-year journalism student sent me the e-mail below that posed an intriguing question about the behavior of the verb “overcome.” Here’s her letter along with my answer:

Dear Mr. Carillo,

In my Speech Communication class, our teacher asked each one of us to deliver a speech for our final exam. A classmate of mine talked about “stage fright,” saying that “Nervousness is normal. It can be overcome.” He delivered his speech well, but since last week, I have been arguing with another classmate, Jesse, about the second sentence of that line: “It can be overcome.” Jesse said that our classmate should have used “It can be overcame” instead. I said that our classmate did the right thing; I argued that “overcome” was correct because the one being addressed had not overcome the nervousness yet. Another correct way of saying it, I said, was “It could be overcome.” This didn’t convince Jesse, who said that he would do more research on it.

Irritated that he didn’t believe me, I told Jesse that there’s no such word as “overcame” in the first place. “Overcome,” I said, could have no past tense since it has no root word; one could tell if it’s in the past tense only if it is “helped” by the auxiliary verbs. I said that simply because we’d hear the word “overcame” every now and then didn’t mean that using it was proper. Well, yesterday, I finally learned that “overcame” is definitely the past tense of “overcome” (thanks to my pontifical intelligence!), but I still couldn’t believe that what I had read from the book is true!

Could you please enlighten me on this? I’d really appreciate it.

Lucky Mae Q.

Here’s my reply to the above e-mail:

Dear Lucky Mae:

I can very well appreciate your dilemma over such a sentence as “It can be overcome.” In “overcome,” you and Jesse had actually stumbled on one of those perplexing, few-of-a-kind irregular verbs that simply won’t follow the English grammar rules as we know them. Compounding the situation is that “overcome” here happens to be consorting with two other strange grammar bedfellows: the modal “can” and the linking verb “be.” The result, as you have seen, is bedlam.

First, let’s get something straight about “overcome.” This verb can be both transitive (needs a direct object) and intransitive (won’t take a direct object); in “It can be overcome,” it works intransitively in the sense of “gaining superiority over something”—in this particular instance, over the aspect of “nervousness.” We must also take note here that when used transitively, “overcome” can be inflected in two ways: into the past tense “overcame,” and into the gerund or progressive form “overcoming.” (This should validate your finding that “overcome” does have a legitimate past tense.) Intransitively, however, “overcome” keeps its uninflected form—meaning that the word doesn’t change at all in a passive construction.

Recall that verbs normally use the following formula in the infinitive of their passive form: “to be” + the main verb’s past participle. Thus, the verb “watch” takes the passive infinitive form “to be watched”; “frighten” inflects to “frightened” to form “to be frightened.” Verbs ending in a vowel, like “take,” add an “n” to themselves to form the past participle, so “take” becomes the passive infinitive “to be taken.” Some verbs, of course, do even more strange things; “buy,” for instance, inflects to “bought” to form the passive infinitive “to be bought.”

There are a few verbs, however, that don’t inflect or change at all when forming their past participles. “Hit,” “cut,” and “shot” are such verbs, forming the passive infinitives “to be hit,” “to be cut,” and “to be shot.” “Overcome” behaves in exactly the same way: it doesn’t inflect to form its past participle. This explains why “to be overcome” is correct and “to be overcame” is wrong. (One other “come” word, the verb “become,” takes the passive infinitive form “to become,” not “to be become”; it gets rid of the extra “be” in the interest of euphony. Such are the errant and confusing ways of some English verbs.)

Now, in the sentence “It can be overcome,” the modal “can” has simply taken the place of the infinitive in “to be overcome.” As we know, “can” indicates current ability in the same sense as “able to,” but being a modal, it also puts some element of uncertainty in the statement. It tells us that although there’s a strong possibility of overcoming one’s nervousness in public speaking, we can never be 100% sure that it will happen. In any case, “overcome” is definitely not being used in its present tense here. It is in every way in the past participle form, except that it had retained its uninflected form and simply didn’t follow the usual rules. (April 14, 2004)

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, April 14, 2004, © 2004 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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