Question sent to my Personal Messages box by Baklis, Forum member (November 20, 2014):Good Morning Sir,
While reading your book
English Plain and Simple, I came across one of the forms of the absolute phrase—the passive perfect participle. Will you please tell me how it works?
Have a nice day!
My reply to Baklis:Yes, of course, I’ll be delighted to explain how that form of the absolute phrase works. In hindsight, in fact, I should have made a detailed explanation in that 2004 book of mine, but then that’s a lot of water under the bridge. I’ll make up for that oversight right now and, before I forget, I’d like to thank you for calling my attention to it.
To put my explanation in context, let me quote the portion of the chapter that mentions the passive perfect participle:
Another aspect that distinguishes absolute phrases from the other phrases is that they contain a subject but not a true finite verb*; instead of a finite verb, they use a participle to modify that subject by supplying a particular circumstance, reason, or time element.
Let us examine three sentences using absolute phrases with different kinds of participles:
With a present participle: “Her eyes welling with tears, the perennial best actress nominee accepted her first acting trophy ever.”
With a past participle: “Our business partnership sealed with a contract, we made a toast to the success of the new company.”
With a passive perfect participle: “The three-week war having been won with a terrible loss of lives, the victors entered the vanquished national capital with a sense of unease.”
With an unstated participle form: “His five-year tour of duty with the company over, the consultant bade adieu to its top executives.”
In the fourth example above, the unstated participle is actually a form of “to be,” which could be either “being” or “having been.” The participle has been left out based on the writer’s gut feel that it is better unstated because it is already understood. Here are two sentences with absolute phrases using this unstated participle form: “The second semester (being) over, the students are gone for their summer vacation.” “(Having been) A newsman since his late teens, Alfred was familiar with the more sordid aspects of urban living.”
By way of quick review, a
participle is a form of the verb that has the function of an adjective and at the same time shows such features of the verb as tense and voice and capacity to take an object. In short, it’s a word that has the characteristics of both verb and adjective.
There are two kinds of participles: the
present participle and the
past participle.
The
present participle expresses present action in relation to the time expressed by the finite verb* in its clause; it is formed by typically adding the suffix “-ing” to the verb’s base form. For example, in the sentence “The witness made a
shocking revelation during the corruption hearings,” the word “shocking” is a present participle formed by adding the suffix “-ing” to the verb “shock.” That present participle in that sentence functions as an adjective modifying the noun “revelation.”
The
past participle, on the other hand, expresses completed action; it is used in forming the perfect tenses in the active voice and all the tenses in the passive voice. Depending on the spelling of the verb, a past participle can end with the suffix “-ed” (as in “shock
ed”), “d” (as in “dislike
d”), “-t” (as in “leap
t”), “-en” (as in “eat
en”), or “-n” (as in “shake
n”).
For example, in the sentence “After hearing the astounding testimony of the star witness, the
shocked audience remained silent all throughout the court proceedings,” the word “shocked” is a past participle formed by adding the suffix “-ed” to the verb “shock.” That past participle, as in the case of the present participle “shocking,” likewise functions as an adjective modifying the noun “audience.”
Take note that in the example given above for the past participle, the main clause is in the active voice and its modifier is a simple prepositional phrase. This question then arises: What happens if the modifying phrase is in the passive voice instead? The answer is that the past participle becomes the so-called
present perfect participle, which has the form “having been + past participle of the verb,” as in the following sentence: “
Having been shocked by the astounding testimony of the star witness, the audience remained silent all throughout the court proceedings.”
In the sentence above, the present perfect participial phrase “having been shocked by the astounding testimony of the star witness” functions as an adjective modifying the noun “audience” in the main clause. The sense is that
as a result of being shocked by the astounding testimony of the star witness, the audience remained silent all throughout the court proceedings. Note that within itself, the present perfect participial phrase “having been shocked by the astounding testimony of the star witness” doesn’t have a subject. It’s a stand-alone adjectival phrase that modifies a subject elsewhere in the sentence—specifically the noun “audience” in the main clause.
Now the big question is:
How does a present perfect participial phrase get transformed into an absolute phrase that uses the passive perfect participle?At the outset, I said that a particular aspect that distinguishes an absolute phrase is that it contains a subject but not a true finite verb*; instead of a finite verb, an absolute phrase uses a participle to modify that subject within the phrase itself by supplying a particular circumstance, reason, or time element.
Now let’s see how the present perfect participial phrase in this sentence—“
Having been shocked by the astounding testimony of the star witness, the audience remained silent all throughout the court proceedings”—might be transformed into an absolute phrase that uses the passive perfect participle. To effect the transformation, we need to supply that present perfect participial phrase with an appropriate subject. In this particular example, it’s clear that this can readily be done by moving the subject “audience” from the main clause to the modifying phrase, as follows:
“
The audience having been shocked by the astounding testimony of the star witness, they remained silent all throughout the court proceedings.”
We can see here that the sentence reconstruction has transformed the present perfect participial phrase into an absolute phrase using a passive perfect participle. This absolute phrase now functions as an
adverbial modifier of the entire new main clause “they remained silent all throughout the court proceedings”
instead of as an adjectival modifier of the original main clause “the audience remained silent all throughout the court proceedings.”
The sentence that I presented in my book
English Plain and Simple as an example of an absolute phrase using a passive perfect participle, you will note, has practically the same pattern as the sentence we have constructed above. For comparison, let’s take a closer look at that example from the book: “
The three-week war having been won with a terrible loss of lives, the victors entered the vanquished national capital with a sense of unease.”
Note that what we have here is a sentence in which the main clause is modified by an absolute phrase consisting of “the three-week war” as the subject followed by the passive perfect participial phrase “having been won with a terrible loss of lives.” Together, they form an adverbial phrase that modifies the main clause “the victors entered the vanquished national capital with a sense of unease.”
(Simply for comparison, here’s how that sentence modified by an absolute phrase using a passive perfect participial phrase might be reverse-engineered into a sentence modified by a present perfect participial phrase: “
Having won the three-week war with a terrible loss of lives, the victors entered the vanquished national capital with a sense of unease.” The modifying phrase no longer has “victors” as its subject; the noun “victors” has moved to the main clause to become its subject instead. See the difference?)
I trust that I have adequately demonstrated how absolute phrases using the passive perfect participle are formed and how they work in sentences.
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*A finite verb, as opposed to a non-finite verb, is one that 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.RELATED READINGS:“What are finite and non-finite verbs?”“How finite verbs differ from non-finite verbs”
