Confused about Participles

[Nuntar]

Could you explain, or give examples?

[gach]

Could you explain, or give examples?

gerund:
doing = "the act of doing" which can be understood as the name of the action when speaking of it as a noun derivation.
participles:
done = "one that is done" and
doing = "one that is doing" in contrast describe another entity that's associated with the doing as an agent or a patient, not the doing itself as gerund does.

I hope this helps.

[Nuntar]

To an extent, it does; thank you.

But what about constructions such as "while doing", "before doing", etc? Those are about the act of doing, but within a sentence concern the agent, e.g. "John laughed while doing his homework". In Ar?ndron those would be expressed with the spatiotemporal cases of the gerund, while other languages, judging by the last few posts, consider them to be participles.

[gach]

To an extent, it does; thank you.

But what about constructions such as "while doing", "before doing", etc? Those are about the act of doing, but within a sentence concern the agent, e.g. "John laughed while doing his homework". In Ar?ndron those would be expressed with the spatiotemporal cases of the gerund, while other languages, judging by the last few posts, consider them to be participles.

They are verbal constructions. In them the original meaning of the participant inflections might be present as it in Enlish is but it has lost its importance. The meaning of a grammatical construction of any kind is independent from the meaning of the original inflections. So technically you could have very different verbal forms as that structure. To give an example Finnish uses a kind of infinitive here. In Finnish the sentence you mentioned would be:

John nauro-i teh-de-ss?-?n kotiteht?v-i-?-?n
John laugh-past(sg3) do-2nd.inf-inessive-3rd.person.poss homework-pl-partitive-3rd.person.poss
"John laughed while doing his homework"

The only border here is your imagination.

[Echobeats]

I'd also add that a participle is a type of non-finite verb, and a non-finite verb is one that doesn't possess every grammatical category that verbs are usually marked for in a given language. For example, Latin participles have tense and voice, but not person -- they depend on the person-marking of the main (finite) verb to show whether they refer to Me, You, or Him/Her/It.

While this is true, it doesn't help much when it comes to distinguishing between participles and other types of non-finite verb, e.g. gerunds

I wasn't attempting to fully answer the original question there -- I was only adding something that hadn't yet been said: the fact that participles necessarily lack marking in some dimension in which finite verbs are marked.

What would you say the distinction is?

At the moment, I don't have an answer. But I'll think about it. Thanks for asking a question that's going to make me have to work something out!

Yours, Tim.

[Jipí]

German, lacking the continuous aspect as tenses, has two participles:

Participle 1:

• gehend, stehend, schreibend, etc.
• Derived from the present tense (present participle)
• Expresses that someone is about to do something, similar to English -ing, though actually only used in writing, and even there it does not occur that often.

Participle 2:

• gegangen, gestanden, geschrieben, etc.
• Derived from the past (past participle)
• Expresses that an action is finished by now. That's why you use the participle 2 with perfect and plusquamperfect. Though instead of the past tense, using the perfect tense in everyday speech is more common. The plusquamperfect is reserved for pre-preterite things only.

[gach]

While speaking about participles Chakhar Mongol seems to have an interesting participle system.

Futuritive Participle
Perfective Participle
Habitive Participle
Imperfective Participle
Potential Participle
Necessitative Participle

The "converbs" look also curious. I haven't seen the term nowhere else but I think they are pretty much same as Finnish infinitives or the gerunds of many other FU lang I've seen (that is used as different adverbials and in many aspectual constructions). It would be nice to learn more about these.

Imperfective Converb
Perfective Converb
Modal Converb
Conditional Converb
Concessive Converb
Terminative Converb
Contemporal Converb
Successive Converb
Preconditional Converb
Incidental Converb
Consecutive Converb
Final Converb
Selective Converb
Abtemporal Converb