Kokia kalbos dalis yra dalyvis?
What kind of part of speech is participle?

Summary/Abstract: We describe participle treatment from the very Proto-Indo-European language grammar, when it was referred to as an adjective, further describing antique times during which a participle was treated as an independent part of speech, also discussing 20th century grammars stating that a participle is a verb form, finally noticing 21st century trend which we see very clearly in educational literature as well as websites aimed at the wide public to give the status of an independent part of speech back to a participle. The view of a participle in other languages such as German, English, and Russian is also discussed. We further provide arguments as to why a participle is referred to as an independent part of speech by showing flaws in the academic grammar statements basing the reason for a participle to be a verb form. According to one of the grammars, the reason behind this is that a participle is required to form complex verb tenses. However, a group of a few participles is enough: nominatives of present and past simple tenses. Any other forms there are incomparably more of are not used for building verb tenses, yet they are treated as verb forms. We noticed even more drawbacks when referring to participle as a verb form: there are inconsistencies found in the very verb definition: The “verb” is described as the part of speech listing only the morphological categories of a personalized verb. Logically, in this case, all of those categories should be listed including both the case and gender i. e. what participles have if they are verb forms. The statement that participles are assigned to verbs because of the voice and tense categories joining them with verbs and it is not convincing because non-personalized verbs do not have voice morphemes does not imply voice hence. That is why we cannot join participles with verb by something verb does not have.

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