Page 239 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

ADJECTIVES AND ADVERBS 225
Like all other nouns, nouns with participial adjectives can occupy the subject or object sentence slot.
(4) Present or past participles can also perform the function of active or passive adverbials (aka reduced adverb clauses) in such constructions as:
Revolving around the earth, the moon is revered in many religions or Revered in many religions, the moon revolves around the earth.
However, participial adverbial phrases are singularly rare in student aca- demic writing (Hinkel, 2002a) and are not worth the time and effort ex- pended on teaching them.
The Most Common Active and Passive Participles in Academic Writing (in any function)
being containing using
involving having
based given used
caused concerned made
obtained produced taken
Active Participles concerning
Passive Participles
A side note. There are three types of -ing constructions in English: the progressive verb aspect (e.g., I/he am/is singing) (see chap. 6); the gerund that is, in fact, a noun derived from a verb (e.g., Singing is enjoy able/Peter enjoys singing) (see chap. 5); and the present participle that can perform the function of an adjective (e.g., a singing bird) or an adverb (While sing- ing, the bird ...).
To tell the difference among the progressive verb aspect, the gerund, and the present participle, the sentence function of an -ingword needs to be de- termined. For instance, an -ing word that is part of the verb phrase is likely to be a progressive verb (e.g., The cake is baking). An -ing word in a subject or ob-
jectsentencepositionisagerund (e.g.,Thekeytolearningisreadingandwrit- ing), and an -ing word that describes a noun or is a subject/object complement is likely to be an adjective (e.g., an amazing story or the story is amazing [to me]).
In many cases, however, it is impossible to tell the difference between the functions of various -ingwords (e.g., / am confusing vs. I am confusing you right now). Also, for example, in the phrase reading books, the function of the word reading can be identified only when it is placed into a sentence (e.g., Reading books are expensive [adjective] vs. Reading books is important [gerund]).
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