1273: Participles: Versatility Jun 5, 2018

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Participles are one of the most versatile lexical classes in English, and can contribute to or act as nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and prepositions. Words like 'running' in 'running is fun' for this reason are even sometimes called verbal nouns because grammatically it acts like a noun, but could be replaced with 'to run'. Moreover, because of their adjunct-like qualities, they can act as adjectives such as in 'the running man' and combine with nouns to form compounds like 'groundbreaking' or in the case of KFC "finger-lickin'". Some, as mentioned before, can act like prepositions; this happens when the relative pronoun is omitted from a relative clause, such as "the box containing (i.e 'with') the supplies" as an alternative to "...which is containing" or "which contains"
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