VBN_CLAUSE Past participial clauses
Definition
Past participle forms functioning as adverbial or adjectival clauses. Excludes perfect aspect, passives, and WHIZBN deletions.
Parent
Detection Rules
Past participle as adverbial clause modifier. Excludes WHIZ deletions (which use acl relation), passives (which use aux:pass relation), and perfect aspect (which uses aux relation).
semgrex{pos:VBN}=vbn <advcl {}
pybiber
VBN with dep advcl or ccomp, preceded by punctuation. Same logic as [[VBG_CLAUSE]]: pybiber requires a comma or other punctuation immediately before the participle as a clause boundary marker.
cql[dep="punct"] [pos="VBN" & dep="advcl|ccomp"]
Normalization
Per finite_verbs
Examples
Exhausted by the journey, Frodo rested
the road taken
These include cancers caused by viruses.
Source: le_foll_2024
Non-examples
He had taken the ring
Perfect aspect (have + VBN) — not a participial clause
The ring was found
Passive voice — see PASS
the man killed
WHIZ deletion — see WHIZBN
Sources
- biber_1988 — Biber, Douglas (1988) : Variation across Speech and Writing
- pybiber — Brown, David West & Reinhart, Alex (2026) : pybiber — Python package for linguistic feature extraction and Multi-Dimensional Analysis
Notes
D5 loading .42. Biber counted these separately from WHIZ deletions (WHIZBN).