The latin participles in respect of aspect-tense

Abstract

An inventory of some Indo-European verb-adjectival formations which are elsewhere, e.g. in Arian, Greek and Slavic, categorized as participles according to voice and aspect, at times according to tense, are preserved in Italic, notedly in Latin, in a rather limited measure: reduced, that is, to two ancient units, faciens and factus and supplemented with two new ones, facturus and faciendus. As such it is, more or less, integrated into the new Latin verb system, whence the necessity to examine the aspect-tense semantics of its forms within this new framework. One functional analysis, relying on a choice of fairly varied examples, leads us to the following conclusions: The form faciens as the present participle active bears in itself the mark of the "paralactic" aspect which enables it to cover also the relative time of simultaneity, while factus or the perfect participle passive is of the "synlelic" aspect either in the sense of the perfect or of the aorist, covering in addition the relative time of anteriority. So the two forms, if one diregards voice which mostly separates them, can be opposed in comparison to Slavic as follows: faciens : factus = čineći: učinjen As the two future participles, the active facturus and the passive faciendus, the latter better known as "gerundive", they are, as forms with modal nuances, in general aspectually neutral, standing with regard to tense between modal intemporality and the future. This may be represented, if the present participle is one's point of departure, in the relation: faciens: facturus/faciendus where the two future participles are, if not opposed, then at least approaching each other. This varied aspect-tense picture of the Latin participle is an evident result of the heterogeneous origin of its forms.