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what do you mean by participles?
A participle is a word formed from a verb that can function as part of a verb phrase.

For example:-

has been

Or independently as an adjective.

For example:-

working woman
hot water bottle

There are three forms of participle: The present participle, the past participle and the perfect participle.

(a) The present participle is a participle that ends in ing. It can be used with the auxilliary verb 'to be' to form the continuous tense. It always takes the ‘ing’ form of the verb, even irregular verbs have an ‘...ing’ form, in fact virtually all English words that end with ‘ing’ are present participles.

For example:-

I am learning English. (Learning is part of the continuous verb phrase 'am learning').

(b) A past participle indicates past or completed action or time. It is often called the 'ed' form as it is formed by adding d or ed, to the base form of regular verbs, however it is also formed in various other ways for irregular verbs.

It can be used to form a verb phrase as part of the present perfect tense.

For example:-

I have learnt English. (Learnt is part of the verb phrase 'have learnt')

(c) The perfect participle indicates completed action. You form the perfect participle by putting the present participle having in front of the past participle.

For example:-

having done, having finished, having read, having spoken.

Having improved his English Peter's promotion prospects were much better.

Note - We use past participles (-ed) to describe how we feel. We use present participles [-ing] to describe what caused the feelings.


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