English has three kinds of nonfinite verbs: ::# infinitives, ::# participles, and ::# gerunds Each of the nonfinite forms appears in a variety of environments.
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A nonfinite verb is a verb that is not finite. Nonfinite verbs cannot perform action as the root of an independent clause. Most nonfinite verbs found in English are infinitives, participles and gerunds. (They are sometimes called "verbals", but that term has traditionally applied only to participles and gerunds.) Additional nonfinite forms found in some other languages include converbs, gerundives and supines.
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Others do not have any nonfinite verbs. Where most European and Asian languages use nonfinite verbs, Native American languages tend to use ordinary verb forms.
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The nonfinite verbs been and examined are, except for tense, neutral across such categories and are not inflected otherwise. The subject, proposal, is a dependent of the finite verb has, which is the root (highest word) in the verb catena. The nonfinite verbs lack a subject dependent. The second sentence shows the following dependency structure: ::Nonfinite tree 2+ The verb catena (in purple) contains four verbs (three of which are nonfinite) and the particle to, which introduces the infinitive have.
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One or more nonfinite verbs may be associated with a finite verb in a finite clause: the elements of a verb catena, or verb chain. Because English lacks most inflectional morphology, the finite and the nonfinite forms of a verb may appear the same in a given context.
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Tapayúna makes use of the diminutive suffixes -tĩ and -re, as well as of the augmentative suffix -txi. Examples include: taratĩ ‘its small wing’ or taratĩre ‘its tiny wing’ (← tara ‘its wing’, an inflected form of jara ‘wing’), hrytĩ ‘small, narrow path’ or hrytĩre ‘a very narrow path’ (← hry ‘path’), thêtxi ‘tick’ (← thê), wĩtxi ‘alligator’ (← wĩ). Nominalizations which denote instruments and places are formed by means of attaching the suffix -tà to the nonfinite form of a verb: kahõ ‘to sweep’ → kahõj ‘to sweep (nonfinite)’ → kahõjtà ‘broom’; wẽ ‘people’ + khrĩ ‘to sit (plural, finite = nonfinite)’ → wẽkhrĩtà ‘seat’. Agent nominalizations are formed by means of attaching the suffix -kanê to the nonfinite form of a verb: hwitô ‘leaf; paper’ + tôk ‘to paint; to write’ → hwĩtôtôkkanê ‘teacher’.
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There are also nonfinite constructions that are marked for perfect, progressive or perfect progressive aspect, using the infinitives, participles or gerunds of the appropriate auxiliaries. The meanings are as would be expected for the respective aspects: perfect for prior occurrence, progressive for ongoing occurrence at a particular time. (Passive voice can also be marked in nonfinite constructions – with infinitives, gerunds and present participles – in the expected way: (to) be eaten, being eaten, having been eaten, etc.) Examples of nonfinite constructions marked for the various aspects are given below. Bare infinitive: ::You should have left earlier.
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Again, the one finite verb, did, is the root of the entire verb catena and the subject, they, is a dependent of the finite verb. The third sentence has the following dependency structure: ::Nonfinite tree 3 Here the verb catena contains three main verbs so there are three separate predicates in the verb catena. The three examples show distinctions between finite and nonfinite verbs and the roles of these distinctions in sentence structure. For example, nonfinite verbs can be auxiliary verbs or main verbs and they appear as infinitives, participles, gerunds etc.
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Some languages, including many Native American languages, form nonfinite constructions by using nominalized verbs.Mithun, Marianne. 1999. The languages of Native America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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In English you can take not only an adjunct but also a predicative complement or a nonfinite catenative complement and prepose them for a special effect.
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The first verb in such a combination is the finite verb, the remainder are nonfinite (although constructions in which even the leading verb is nonfinite are also possible – see below). Such combinations are sometimes called compound verbs; more technically they may be called verb catenae, since they are not generally strict grammatical constituents of the clause. As the last example shows, the words making up these combinations do not always remain consecutive. For details of the formation of such constructions, see English clause syntax.
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Pykobjê widely uses the diminutive suffix -re and the augmentative suffix -teh, which may combine with nouns and descriptive predicates. Instrumental/locative nominalizations are formed by means of the suffix -xỳ, which attached to the nonfinite forms of verbs.
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For the usage of such forms, see the section below on perfect and progressive nonfinite constructions. Although all of the constructions referred to here are commonly referred to as perfect (based on their grammatical form), some of them, particularly nonpresent and nonfinite instances, might not be considered truly expressive of the perfect aspect. This applies particularly when the perfect infinitive is used together with modal verbs: for example, he could not have been a genius might be considered (based on its meaning) to be a past tense of he cannot/could not be a genius;Tim Stowell. UCLA. Tense and Modals.
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In English, verbs frequently appear in combinations containing one or more auxiliary verbs and a nonfinite form (infinitive or participle) of a main (lexical) verb. For example: ::The dog was barking very loudly. ::My hat has been cleaned. ::Jane does not really like us.
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The main uses of the various nonfinite verb forms (infinitives, participles and gerunds) are described in the following sections. For how these forms are made, see above. For more information on distinguishing between the various uses that use the form in -ing, see -ing: Uses.
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The following sentences each contain one finite verb (underlined) and multiple nonfinite verbs (in bold): ::The proposal _has_ been intensively examined today. ::What _did_ they want to have done about that? ::Someone _tried_ to refuse to accept the offer. ::Coming downstairs, she _saw_ the man running away.
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The nonfinite verb forms in Modern Greek are identical to the third person of the dependent (or aorist subjunctive) and it is also called the aorist infinitive. It is used with the auxiliary verb έχω (to have) to form the perfect, the pluperfect and the future perfect tenses.
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In linguistics, a verb phrase (VP) is a syntactic unit composed of at least one verb and its dependentsobjects, complements and other modifiersbut not always including the subject. Thus in the sentence A fat man put the money quickly in the box, the words put the money quickly in the box are a verb phrase; it consists of the verb put and its dependents, but not the subject a fat man. A verb phrase is similar to what is considered a predicate in more traditional grammars. Verb phrases generally are divided among two types: finite, of which the head of the phrase is a finite verb; and nonfinite, where the head is a nonfinite verb, such as an infinitive, participle or gerund.
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Nonfinite verbs typically are not inflected by grammatical tense, and they have little inflection for other grammatical categories.On their lack of inflection, see, for instance, Radford (1997:508f.), Tallerman (1998:68), Finch (2000:92f.), and Ylikoski (2003:186). Formally, they lack the three grammatical features (mood, tense and voice) that are "associated, independently or relatively, with...the act of predication." Generally, they also lack a subject dependent.
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Vietnamese, like many languages in Southeast Asia, is an analytic (and isolating) language. Vietnamese lacks morphological marking of case, gender, number, and tense (and, as a result, has no finite/nonfinite distinction).Comparison note: As such its grammar relies on word order and sentence structure rather than morphology (in which word changes through inflection). Whereas European languages tend to use morphology to express tense, Vietnamese uses grammatical particles or syntactic constructions.
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For an overview of dependency grammar structure in modern linguistic analysis, three example sentences are shown. The first sentence, The proposal has been intensively examined, is described as follows. ::Nonfinite tree 1+' The three verbs together form a chain, or verb catena (in purple), which functions as the predicate of the sentence. The finite verb has is inflected for person and number, tense, and mood: third person singular, present tense, indicative.
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There are only several dozen of transitive verbs which take an accusative patient, all of which are monosyllabic and have distinct finite and nonfinite forms. It has been suggested that all transitive verbs which satisfy both conditions (monosyllabicity and a formal finiteness distinction), and only them, select for accusative patients, while all remaining transitive verbs take absolutive patients in Canela and all other Northern Jê languages. All subordinate clauses as well as recent past clauses (which are historically derived from subordinate clauses and are headed by a nonfinite verb) are ergatively organized: the agents of transitive verbs (A) are encoded by ergative postpositional phrases, whereas the patients of transitive verbs (P) and the sole arguments of all intransitive predicates (S) receive the absolutive case (also called internal case). Evaluative, progressive, continuous, completive, and negated clauses (which are historically derived from former biclausal constructions with an ergatively organized subordinate clause and a split-S matrix clause) in Canela have the cross-linguistically rare nominative-absolutive alignment pattern.
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Vietnamese, like Chinese and many languages in Southeast Asia, is an analytic language. Vietnamese does not use morphological marking of case, gender, number or tense (and, as a result, has no finite/nonfinite distinction). Comparison note: As such its grammar relies on word order and sentence structure rather than morphology (in which word changes through inflection). Whereas European languages tend to use morphology to express tense, Vietnamese uses grammatical particles or syntactic constructions.
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In linguistics, control is a construction in which the understood subject of a given predicate is determined by some expression in context. Stereotypical instances of control involve verbs. A superordinate verb "controls" the arguments of a subordinate, nonfinite verb. Control was intensively studied in the government and binding framework in the 1980s, and much of the terminology from that era is still used today.See for instance van Riemsdijk and Williams (1986:128ff.), Cowper (1992:161ff.), Borsley (1996:126-144).
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Vaught's "Never 2" theorem states that a complete first-order theory cannot have exactly two nonisomorphic countable models. He considered his best work was his paper "Invariant sets in topology and logic", introducing the Vaught transform. He is known for the Tarski–Vaught test for elementary substructures, the Feferman–Vaught theorem, the Łoś–Vaught test for completeness and decidability, the Vaught two-cardinal theorem, and his conjecture on the nonfinite axiomatizability of totally categorical theories (this work eventually led to geometric stability theory).
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Single verb as the head of predicates is infrequent in the corpus, as most heads of predicates (of both matrix and dependent clauses) are serial verb constructions. In addition, there is no clear distinction between copular clauses and nonverbal clauses The clauses inside Poula complex sentences have one matrix clause and one or more dependent clauses. In such constructions, typically, Poula verbs in dependent clauses are marked differently than the verbs in matrix clauses. Poula nonfinite dependent clauses mostly occur to the left of matrix clause.
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As noted above, retroflex phonemes in early Indo-Aryan cannot identify the donor language as specifically Dravidian. Krishnamurti argues the Dravidian case for other features: "Besides, the Veda has used the gerund, not found in Avestan, with the same grammatical function as in Dravidian, as a nonfinite verb for 'incomplete' action. Vedic language also attests the use of iti as a quotative clause complementizer." However, such features are also found in the indigenous Burushaski language of the Pamirs and cannot be attributed only to Dravidian influence on the early Rigveda.
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In Proto-Indo-European, the aorist appears to have originated as a series of verb forms expressing manner of action. Michael Meier-Brügger, Matthias Fritz, Manfred Mayrhofer, Indo-European Linguistics, Walter de Gruyter, 2003, , pp. 173–176. Proto-Indo-European had a three-way aspectual opposition, traditionally called "present", "aorist", and "perfect", which are thought to have been, respectively, imperfective, perfective, and stative (resultant state) aspects. By the time of Classical Greek, this system was maintained largely in independent instances of the non-indicative moods and in the nonfinite forms.
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A gerund' ( abbreviated ') is any of various nonfinite verb forms in various languages; most often, but not exclusively, one that functions as a noun. In English, it has the properties of both verb and noun, such as being modifiable by an adverb and being able to take a direct object. The term "-ing form" is often used in English to refer to the gerund specifically. Traditional grammar makes a distinction within -ing forms between present participles and gerunds, a distinction that is not observed in such modern, linguistically informed grammars as A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language and The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.
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Current views vary on whether all languages have a verb phrase; some schools of generative grammar (such as principles and parameters) hold that all languages have a verb phrase, while others (such as lexical functional grammar) take the view that at least some languages lack a verb phrase constituent, including those languages with a very free word order (the so-called non-configurational languages, such as Japanese, Hungarian, or Australian aboriginal languages), and some languages with a default VSO order (several Celtic and Oceanic languages). Phrase structure grammars view both finite and nonfinite verb phrases as constituent phrases and, consequently, do not draw any key distinction between them. Dependency grammars (described below) are much different in this regard.
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The implications of the present perfect (that something occurred prior to the present moment) are similar to those of the simple past, although the two forms are generally not used interchangeably – the simple past is used when the time frame of reference is in the past, while the present perfect is used when it extends to the present. For details, see the relevant sections below. For all uses of specific perfect constructions, see the sections below on the present perfect, past perfect, future perfect and conditional perfect. By using nonfinite forms of the auxiliary have, perfect aspect can also be marked on infinitives (as in should have left and expect to have finished working), and on participles and gerunds (as in having seen the doctor).
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Bastiaanse (2008) did not find such dissociation for Dutch but rather that reference to the past is more impaired regardless of verb inflection or agreement. Her research found that finite verbs are more difficult than non-finite verbs, but both within the finite verbs and within the nonfinite verbs, the forms referring to the past (third person singular past tense and participle respectively) are more difficult than their counterparts referring to the present (third person singular present tense and infinitives). None of the hypotheses on verb forms aforementioned (TPH, TUH, and TAUH) can account for these results, ever since participles in Dutch are not inflected for tense and agreement nor do they check their features in the left periphery. Similar findings have been also reported for Greek and for English respectively in a re-analysis of Nanousi et al.
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