Students have asked me to review the difference between using the gerund and past participle to replace clauses. The gerund can replace either a simple present tense or a present or past continous. The past participle (ED) can only replace a PASSIVE verb or a complement.
- Combining sentences makes for more interesting and more sophisticated (read: more C1/C2).
- To do so, one of the techniques is replacing clauses with present or past participles (read: ing or having ed or ed).
- Students don’t always do this well- the two common errors are
- A . using ED when it’s NOT A clause with “be” … i.e., neither passive nor complementary
- B. misplacing the ED past participle, again due to thinking in terms of active vs passive verbs.
NO Arrived first at the cottage, the wolf disguised himself as LRRH’s grandmother (NO!! This is not a passive or complementary verb. You should use “having arrived at the cottage before LRRH)
YES Eaten by the wolf, LRRH never came home.(A horrible sentence but grammatically OK, as it is passive)
YES Concerned that LRRH hadn’t yet returned, her mother called her friend the hunter.(This is OK because it’s a complement with the verb to be = because she was concerned)
for more, see these links
http://www.ego4u.com/en/cram-up/grammar/participles (scroll down to the end)
and exercises
http://www.ego4u.com/en/cram-up/grammar/participles/exercises?06
and I’ll post a quiz soon.