Posts tagged with "verb aspect"

Polish Participles – imiesłowy continued

Posted by Anna 6 Comments
Apr 28 2010

As promised, today we will take a more in-depth look at the mystical imiesłowy. Joy oh joy, I know.
To do this we need to pick a nice, easy verb. How about “pisać”? And how about “napisać”? Both mean “to write”, but pisać is imperfective, and napisać is perfective.

Ready? Ok, here we go.

  • piszący – active adjectival participle – (one who is) writing

This form is normally constructed using the present tense 3rd person plural form of the verb and adding “-c” plus the appropriate adjectival ending, like this:

  • pisać (infinitive) – piszą (present tense 3rd person plural) – piszący, pisząca, piszące (active adjectival participle, masculine, feminine, neuter).

And it refers to an ongoing action.

See? That wasn’t too bad.
Now let’s try it with the active adverbial participle of the same verb:

  • pisząc – writing (while writing, when somebody was writing something).

This is also easy to make. Just take the present tense 3rd person plural form of your imperfective verb and stick “c” to the end of it. Like this:

  • pisać (infinitive) – piszą (present tense 3rd person plural) – pisząc (active adverbial participle).

It refers to an action (or state) that happens simultaneously to another action (or state).
And luckily for us, this participle doesn’t do anything extraordinary, it doesn’t decline and has no gender. Phew!

Then there’s the adverbial participle of prior action, which refers to something that has already been completed by the time the main action is taking place.
This grammatical wonder is only formed using perfective verbs and though it may look vaguely adjectivey, it doesn’t decline. And, to be perfectly honest, you won’t hear it much in casual speech. It’s the stuff that prose is made of.

But just in case, how do we make it? Like this:
Take the masculine singular past tense of the verb:

  • napisał – (3rd person singular, masculine, past tense) – he wrote

Get rid of the “ł” and add “-wszy” instead:

  • napisawszy – having written

To be continued…

Future Tense of Perfective and Imperfective Verbs

Posted by Anna No Comments
Aug 14 2009

One of you (once again, I can always count on you, my fab readers!) wanted to know more about this whole verb aspect issue. More specifically, how to tell whether a verb is perfective or imperfective by looking at its future tense form.

And finally, this is one thing that is actually very simple, easy and straightforward in Polish. Really!

Let’s use these two verbs that you should already know from the previous post about aspect: pomóc and pomagać (to help).

Which one of those is perfective? If you know how to create future tense forms of Polish verbs, finding out the aspect is a piece of cake.

Take a look at all the future tense forms of “pomóc”:

  • ja (I) – pomogę
  • ty (you, singular) – pomożesz
  • on, ona, ono (he, she, it) – pomoże
  • my (we) – pomożemy
  • wy (you, plural) – pomożecie
  • oni, one (they, masculine, feminine) – pomogą

and now let’s see what happens with “pomagać”:

  • ja (I) – będę pomagać (or for feminine “I” – będę pomagała; masculine – będę pomagał)
  • ty (you, singular) – będziesz pomagać (or for feminine you – będziesz pomagała; masculine – będziesz pomagał)
  • on, ona, ono (he, she, it) – będzie pomagać (or for she – będzie pomagała, he – będzie pomagał, it – będzie pomagało)
  • my (we) – będziemy pomagać (or for feminine we – będziemy pomagały; masculine or mixed gender – będziemy pomagali)
  • wy (you, plural) – będziecie pomagać (or for feminine you plural – będziecie pomagały; masculine or mixed gender – będziecie pomagali)
  • oni, one (they, masculine, feminine) – będą pomagać (or for feminine they – będą pomagały; masculine or mixed gender – będą pomagali)

See the difference? The perfective form is just a single word without any “będę” in front of it. And that’s exactly how you can tell if a verb is perfective or not. All the double bits with “będę/będziesz, etc” are imperfective verbs.

I told you it would be easy. What may not be easy is how to create all those future tense forms. But that’s a whole another story for another blog post.

Verb Aspect – one more time

Posted by Anna No Comments
Jul 28 2009

Agnieszka left a comment asking for help with explaining the difference between pomóc and pomagać (to help), and prosić and poprosić (to ask). And when a reader asks – I dig out my fat Swan’s “Polish Grammar” book and get cranking.

We’ve talked about this verb aspect thingie before. Because that’s what it’s called – aspect. And it has to do with how an action is conceived and executed – whether it’s completed, or habitual, or on-going, and what not.

In English it’s done through the many tenses: continuous, perfect, and so on. And in Polish the same thing is expressed through our many verb forms. Luckily, we’ll be talking only about two of those forms, because most Polish verbs have two aspects.

One is perfective, and it refers to an action which is completed – done and over with. But not just any old done and over with, but the kind that actually produces a change in the general state of things. The other aspect is imperfective and that one deals with all sorts of other types of actions: on-going, habitual and even actions that are completed, but which did not produce any change in the general state of things.

Confusing? Let’s try it again, this time using Agnieszka’s examples.

  • pomóc and pomagać – to help

Pomóc is a perfective verb. Why? It doesn’t have a present tense form.
You can only say:

  • ja pomogę (future tense), or
  • ja pomogłem (past tense masculine) or
  • ja pomogłam (past tense feminine)

If you want to say that you are helping someone right now, you have to use “pomagać” and say:

  • ja pomagam – present tense (all genders)

The easiest way to spot the difference between these two is when looking at their past tense forms:

  • pomóc – pomogłem, pomogłam (perfective)
  • pomagać – pomagałem, pomagałam (imperfective)

The first one (pomogłem, pomogłam) clearly shows that the action is finished and that we successfully managed to help. Our help brought results.

The second one, on the other hand, only tells us that we were helping and helping and helping and that’s it. We have absolutely no clue if our help actually worked. Or not.

So, what’s the deal with prosić and poprosić? Here it gets a bit funkier, because the perfective form of the verb is created by adding a prefix: “po-“ in this case.
And so “prosić” becomes “poprosić” – to ask

But don’t worry, all the other stuff applies just the same.
“Poprosić” is a perfective verb, and as such has no present tense. You can only say:

  • ja poproszę (future tense) or
  • ja poprosiłem (past tense masculine) or
  • ja poprosiłam (past tense feminine)

And now, let’s compare this with “prosić”:

  • ja proszę (present tense, all genders)

– yep, it has present tense, so it must be an imperfective verb!

And in the past tense:

  • ja prosiłem (past tense masculine) or
  • ja prosiłam (past tense feminine)

When “ja poprosiłam” I got some sort of reaction from the person I was asking. My action of asking them is done.

But when “ja prosiłam” I was doing it over and over and got no results. And frankly, we can’t really tell if I’m completely done with all that asking, or not.

Polish verb aspect is not an easy thing to learn, but one of our readers suggested this thing: learn both verbs as totally separate words, don’t pair them up. I’ve tried that and it works. It seems like a lot more work in the beginning, but once when you get the hang of it, it’s actually a very effective way to get all this aspect mess nicely sorted out.

Good luck!

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