🗣️ The infinitive, the participle and the verbal adjectives

Greek builds much of its syntax on non-finite forms. Every tense stem and voice has an infinitive and a participle, so these forms carry aspect and voice as the finite verb does. The infinitive is a verbal noun: with the article it declines and stands in any case. The participle is a verbal adjective, and does the work of English relative clauses, adverbial clauses and the reported clauses of perception and knowledge. A page of Attic prose often has more participles than finite verbs. This chapter gives the forms, the uses of the infinitive with and without the article, the three uses of the participle, the genitive absolute, and the verbal adjectives in -τός and -τέος.

Contents

1. The forms
2. The infinitive without the article
3. The articular infinitive
4. The participle: attributive
5. The participle: circumstantial
6. The genitive absolute
7. The participle: supplementary
8. Verbs that take an infinitive or a participle with a change of sense
9. The verbal adjectives in -τός and -τέος
10. How Mova handles it
11. Sources

1. The forms

The active participles decline in the third declension in the masculine and neuter and in the first in the feminine (λύοντος, λυούσης); the middle ones in -μενος like ἀγαθός (chapter 4) (smyth-1920 §§300–310, 469).

The tense of an infinitive or participle is its aspect, not its time (chapter 7, §2), except in indirect discourse and in the future participle, which looks forward.

2. The infinitive without the article

The infinitive is a noun in the neuter singular, with the force of a verb (smyth-1920 §§1966–2024):

• as subject of impersonal expressions: δεῖ ἀπιέναι "it is necessary to go away"; ἔξεστι "it is allowed";
• as object of verbs of wishing, being able, trying, beginning, ordering: βούλομαι λέγειν "I want to speak", δύναται ποιεῖν "he can do";
• in indirect discourse after verbs of saying and thinking (φημί, νομίζω, οἴομαι): φησὶ τὸν ἄνδρα ἐλθεῖν "he says that the man came" (chapter 14). Here the tense of the infinitive keeps the tense of the direct statement: the aorist infinitive means a past event;
• of result with ὥστε: οὕτως ἔβη ὥστε πεσεῖν "he walked so that he fell";
• of purpose, mostly in poetry and after verbs of giving and sending: δίδωσιν αὐτῷ πιεῖν "he gives him (something) to drink".

The subject of an infinitive is in the accusative when it differs from the subject of the main verb, and is left out when it is the same; a predicate word then agrees with the main subject in the nominative: φησὶν εἶναι σοφός "he says he is wise", against φησὶν αὐτὸν εἶναι σοφόν "he says that he (another) is wise" (smyth-1920 §§1972–1983). This is the accusative and infinitive of Latin (la chapter 10, §3).

3. The articular infinitive

With the neuter article τό, τοῦ, τῷ the infinitive becomes a noun that declines, takes prepositions, and keeps its own subject, object and adverbs (smyth-1920 §§2025–2038):

• τὸ λέγειν "speaking" (subject or object);
• τοῦ λέγειν "of speaking"; with a negative τοῦ μὴ λέγειν; of purpose, "in order to speak";
• τῷ λέγειν "by speaking";
• διὰ τὸ λέγειν "because of speaking", ἐν τῷ λέγειν "while speaking", πρὸ τοῦ λέγειν "before speaking", μετὰ τὸ λέγειν "after speaking".

An articular infinitive can carry a whole clause: διὰ τὸ τοὺς Ἀθηναίους μὴ βούλεσθαι πολεμεῖν "because the Athenians did not want to fight".

In the Septuagint the genitive τοῦ + infinitive renders the Hebrew lə- + infinitive construct, mostly of purpose: οὐκ ἐχρόνισεν ὁ νεανίσκος τοῦ ποιῆσαι τὸ ῥῆμα τοῦτο "the young man did not delay to do this thing" (Gen. 34:19), τοῦ περιτέμνεσθαι "to be circumcised" (Gen. 34:17). In the PTNK training set (Genesis and Ruth), 41 of the 58 articular infinitives are genitive (UD 2.18, counted 2026-10-22). ἐν τῷ + infinitive renders bə- + infinitive, "when, while": καὶ ἐγένετο ἐν τῷ εἶναι αὐτοὺς ἐν τῷ πεδίῳ "and it came to pass when they were in the field" (grc-x-koine).

4. The participle: attributive

With the article, a participle is an adjective or a noun: the equivalent of an English relative clause (smyth-1920 §§2049–2053):

• ὁ παρὼν καιρός "the present occasion";
• οἱ λέγοντες "those who speak, the speakers";
• ὁ βουλόμενος "whoever wishes, anyone";
• τὰ γενόμενα "what happened".

The negative of an attributive participle is μή when it is general ("anyone who does not"), οὐ when it denotes particular persons.

5. The participle: circumstantial

Without the article and agreeing with a noun or pronoun of the clause, a participle gives the circumstances of the main action (smyth-1920 §§2054–2069): time, cause, condition, concession, purpose (the future participle), manner or means. The relation is not stated by the form; the context and a few particles make it plain:

The aorist participle usually denotes an action before the main verb, the present one at the same time, as aspect would suggest: a train of aorist participles is the Greek way to tell a sequence of events with one finite verb at the end.

6. The genitive absolute

A participle and a noun in the genitive, not part of the main clause, form an absolute construction like the Latin ablative absolute (la chapter 6) (smyth-1920 §§2070–2075):

ταῦτα ποιούντων αὐτῶν ἦλθεν ὁ ἄγγελος "while they were doing this, the messenger came"

Its subject must differ from the subject of the main clause in classical Greek. In the Koine the rule is loosened, and the genitive absolute appears even where its subject is in the main clause. Impersonal verbs form an accusative absolute: ἐξόν "it being allowed", δέον "it being necessary".

The genitive absolute is rare in the Septuagint narrative of Genesis and Ruth (4 in the PTNK training set; UD 2.18, 2026-10-22), where the Hebrew coordinates finite clauses instead (§3, and chapter 13).

7. The participle: supplementary

A participle completes the meaning of certain verbs (smyth-1920 §§2088–2148):

• verbs of beginning, continuing, ceasing: παύομαι λέγων "I stop speaking", διατελεῖ ποιῶν "he goes on doing";
• τυγχάνω, λανθάνω, φθάνω: ἐτύγχανε παρών "he happened to be present"; ἔλαθεν ἀπελθών "he escaped notice going away" = "he went away unnoticed"; ἔφθασαν ἀφικόμενοι "they arrived first". The main idea is in the participle, and the finite verb gives its manner: "happen to", "without being noticed", "first";
• verbs of perception and knowledge in indirect discourse: ὁρῶ σε ἥκοντα "I see that you have come", οἶδα θνητὸς ὤν "I know that I am mortal" (the predicate in the nominative, as the subject is the same).

8. Verbs that take an infinitive or a participle with a change of sense

(smyth-1920 §§2123–2148)

9. The verbal adjectives in -τός and -τέος

• -τός gives a passive or potential sense: λυτός "loosed, able to be loosed", ὁρατός "visible", ἄγνωστος "unknown, unknowable".
• -τέος gives necessity, like the Latin gerundive: λυτέος ἐστί "he must be loosed". Its neuter impersonal construction takes the object of the verb and the dative of the agent: λυτέον ἐστί σοι τὸν ἵππον "you must loose the horse". "One must" in Plato and the orators is often ποιητέον, λεκτέον, σκεπτέον (smyth-1920 §§2149–2152).

10. How Mova handles it

In the UD trees. In the PTNK training set (Genesis and Ruth, UD 2.18, 2026-10-22), 310 tokens are participles and 147 infinitives, against 2,348 finite verbs. The participle is mostly advcl (173: circumstantial) or acl:relcl (64: attributive). The article of an articular infinitive is det of the infinitive. The genitive absolute is an advcl participle with a genitive subject.

In Mova. The English parser after en xpos-fill takes a Greek participle as an English participle and the attachments from the trees. What a Greek frames reader needs:

1. The circumstantial participle as an event, with its subject from agreement (the noun it agrees with), and its relation to the main event (time, cause, concession) from the particles of §5, or left as "circumstance" when none is given, the way English -ing clauses are left.
2. The aorist participle's event before the main one (§5): a sequence of events read off a chain of participles, as the English reader reads and then.
3. The articular infinitive as an event noun, with its case and preposition giving the relation (διὰ τό "because", ἐν τῷ "while", τοῦ "in order to").
4. The supplementary participle of τυγχάνω, λανθάνω, φθάνω with the event in the participle and the manner in the finite verb (§7): the inverse of the usual head.
5. The subject of the infinitive: the accusative when it differs from the main subject, the main subject when it is absent (§2).

11. Sources

• Smyth, H. W. 1920 (smyth-1920): §§300–310 and 469 (the forms), §§1966–2038 (the infinitive), §§2039–2148 (the participle), §§2149–2152 (the verbal adjectives), paraphrased from the Perseus text (CC BY-SA).
• Goodwin, W. W. 1890, Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb (goodwin-1890): the infinitive and the participle, public domain.
• UD Ancient Greek PTNK (CC BY-SA 4.0): counts.

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