a verb form combining the properties of both verb and adjective and expressing adjectivally an action or state as a property of a person or object, as in pishushchii (“writing”), podniatyi (“raised”), and sgibaemyi (“flexible”). In Russian, the verbal nature of a participle is evidenced by the presence of the categories of voice and aspect and by the retention of patterns of government adjoinment (primykanie); this is seen by comparing dolgo rabotaet v pole (“he works long in the field”) and dolgo rabotaiushchii v pole (“the man working long in the field”). A participle does not form a sentence, however, except in the case of the short forms, and lacks the categories of mood and person. It possesses the category of relative tense, which refers not to the moment of speech, as with a verb, but to the time of the main action as expressed by the conjugated verb of the predicate. A participle resembles an adjective in having the agreement categories of gender, number, and case. Like adjectives, participles have the syntactic function of defining, which may be parenthetic (parenthetic attribute construction). Participles may undergo adjectivization, that is, become adjectives.
Participles are present in all the Indo-European languages and are a special grammatical subclass in other language families, such as Finno-Ugric, Altaic, and Semitic. In contemporary linguistics there is no unanimously held opinion concerning the grammatical nature of the participle.
V. A. VINOGRADOV