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Past vs Present participle logic | ||
Tags: Verbs/Conjugation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4954 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 1 of 20 19 August 2012 at 4:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I suspect this has either a very easy explanation (under my nose), or it simply has no explanation. I will dispense with the verbiage and get right to it. Compare grammatically first:
(yo) Sigo comiendo. (yo) Sigo sentado. (yo) Sigo sorprendido. (yo) Sigo aprendiendo. Analyze these 4 examples. Two are using the present participle and two the past particple. Look what happens if I vary from this: Sigo comido (X) Sigo sentando (X) Sigo sorprendiendo (??) Sigo aprendido (X) The (X) means they are just completely wrong, and make no sense. But look how the 3rd option possibly does make sense both with a past and present participle, with a nuance in meaning. Go a step further and analyze the nature of the actions themselves. The first one only makes sense with the present participle if the action of "eating" is still continuing in the literal sense (and makes no sense with a past participle). The 2nd does not make sense at all with a present participle, because the action of "seating" yourself is considered ephemeral, and you can't have a continuous aspect in this example without seemingly remaining a rational situation (imagine yourself standing and sitting down someone/something for 30 minutes continuosly... that is what "Sigo sentando" would hint at, and you would develop a "reputation" with everyone :) ). The third example can make sense with BOTH. With the past participle ("Sigo sorprendido"), it means at one point someone or something did something shocking and you still feel the effects of that, even if the event itself was fugacious. If you use the present participle ("Sigo sorprendiendo"), it intimates that you are carrying out actions or behavior that shock OTHERS in a recurrent fashion. I hope that difference is understood. The fourth example only makes sense with the present participle, yet one does not need to be carrying the action out continuosly, sinse "learning" is considered (I guess) an enduring state thus you could be on vacation but still say "Sigo aprendiendo". I'm a native Spanish speaker and I would not be able to explain to a learner what grammatically or semantically determines the use of past or present participle, without my "instinct", which is all I've used here. I'll put English up for a cross-comparison: I continue eating. I continue (remain) seated. I continue (remain) shocked. I continue learning. Notice how here you may need to change your main verb, though "I continue seated" seems perfectly fine, "I continue shocked" appears as a poor choice of words. I can't explain this either to a foreign learner except to say "that's just how it is". Given the above, I am incapable of conveying this rich nuance RELIABLY in French or German. I would just "cop" out and use the present tense ("Je suis assis" / "Ich esse gerade"), but I know very well those do not mean at all the above, thus you lose something by returning to this kind of safety. I would be temped to ask French or German natives how you would translate those examples, but I'm hoping that someone much smarter and experienced than me has perhaps a more logical way of explaining this phenomenon so I can much more reliably use this in my target languages. Of course I know that what works for French, or Spanish, may not work in German, but bottom line, I'm usually stomped when I want to convey these nuances and mastering these "aspects" (present vs continuous vs "lingering" actions), seems to me like a huge step to a more advanced mastery of language. Thank you for your time and help! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5537 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 20 19 August 2012 at 4:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
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There's a couple of things going on here, I think:
1. Different languages express different verb aspects. For example, English distinguishes between "I sit" and "I am sitting" in the present tense, but French generally doesn't. But in the past, French distinguishes between the imparfait and the passé simple, using subtly different rules than English uses to distinguish between "I sat" and "I was sitting". 2. The rules for participles vary tremendously between languages. French present participles (such as courant, "running") are much less flexible than the equivalent in English. In general, if you can't express an aspect directly, most languages will have a work- around. For example, if you want to say "I am loading the car", you can choose between the following:
Similarly, you may see helper verbs or adverbs picking up the slack:
As long as you stick to Indo-European languages, you can often find rough correspondences that work 80% of the time. But eventually you'll run into something like Latin's perfect passive participles, which are elegant enough in Latin prose, but which translate into English as the insanely ugly construction "having been ____ed". And as you go further afield, things get even weirder. Many kinds of Egyptian sentences have no verb at all. Instead, they rely on various combinations of particles, demonstratives, word order and context to convey verb aspects (and even tenses). Apparently, once you introduce verbs, it gets even stranger still. I think you're right when you say, "That's just how it is." You can't always express every verbal aspect in another language, and even when you can, it's often undesirable. For example, the French use "en train de" much less often than English-speakers use the present progressive. My current strategy is (1) to think in French, instead of translating from English, and (2) to imitate the natives as much as possible. Edited by emk on 19 August 2012 at 6:53pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4954 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 3 of 20 19 August 2012 at 5:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hahaha, that is my strategy too, just simply to develop the "instinct" based on massive amounts of listening and reading, but I also love the huge puzzle that is language construct, so why not try tackling it from this point to.
You are right, "Je reste assis", is how I would say it too. Yet in German I most often hear "Ich bleibe sitzen". Notice how the French uses a Past P, but German uses neither. So I can in fact convey this nuance if I'm brave enough, but I don't have enough confidence to extend this to verbs I don't know. Thus why I'm trying to see if there is a trick or something :) "En train de" is like German "gerade", which is how these two languages can express explicitly progressive aspect where English/Spanish have full progressive tenses (thus why the English and Spanish progressive "creeps" into areas that could use the simple present, and in fact are used with the simple present in German and French). Since those are not actual full progressive grammatical constructs, their uses is much more restricted. The French and Germans only use them when they are being explicitly interrupted while doing that action (phone call, you show up at the door etc). English and Spanish can use progressive tenses even without such obvious mark. Edited by outcast on 19 August 2012 at 5:21pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5135 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 4 of 20 19 August 2012 at 5:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Can't speak for French or German, but it would seem you're making your Spanish examples
way too complicated. Where they work properly, the present participle is functioning as a gerund for an action verb. The past particle is functioning as an adjective describing the subject. R. == 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4954 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 5 of 20 19 August 2012 at 5:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
Actually this is important information for me, thanks for that. Since I haven't dissected Spanish grammatically like you, this is one of the great benefits of seeing one's native languages from the standpoint of the foreign lerner. Your description of the Spanish examples make sense, "gerund of action verb", and "past p. acting as adjective". Just remember I simply came up with those phrases, I didn't analyze them like you just did since to me they come naturally, the downside to that is I can't explain what makes them different, like you just did. So thank you! But it still does not explain, even in Spanish, what determines when to use one or the other. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4833 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 6 of 20 19 August 2012 at 9:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
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An interesting topic, which reminds me of some problems I've had in the past, and still
have to some extent, with the present participle in German. I need to go back to my grammar books, and also find some examples of what I'm getting at. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6914 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 20 19 August 2012 at 11:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Not that I think that many natives think about grammar before uttering statements, but past participle endings function like adjectives (including gender agreement -ado/-ada, -ido/-ida) and is more "a result of an action" and therefore I think it's obvious that the examples look the way they do.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5231 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 8 of 20 19 August 2012 at 11:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
After reading your original post (perhaps not attentively enough), I was scratching my head trying to figure out what the question was. If that's all that there's to it, maybe thinking in terms of 'active' and 'passive' participles will help you. BTW, I'm not so sure just one of them can be used in every example you gave, but from the terms above it should be pretty intuitive when to use which one ;) Edited by mrwarper on 20 August 2012 at 12:00am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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