The past participle (also called the past participle) is one of the three non-personal forms of the verb: infinitive, gerund, and participle. The participle is used as a verb form that refers to an action that has already occurred and therefore belongs to the past, although it refers to a recent past and is still related to the present: we have achieved victory this morning, the year has ended with good results. In these last two examples, the action has already happened but in both cases they belong to a recent moment (the morning belongs to today and it is understood that the year is not over yet).
In the Spanish language, the participle is always past. This verb form allows you to create a subordinate clause, perform passive conjugation, or apply a qualification to a noun. Some examples of participles are “bought” (“I already bought a number for this year's raffle”), “interpreted” (“The text has been interpreted by a very talented Portuguese actor”) and “robados” (“The stolen cars they were valued at half a million euros ").
As a curious fact, the name of the participle is given as a result of its participation in both the adjective and the function of the verb, although it simply maintains the nuances of the latter. As indicated in the previous paragraph, current Spanish only recognizes the participle that denotes an action in the past, regardless of the distance it maintains with the present; for this reason, until a few years ago, the dictionary of the RAE called the passive or past participle.
As we said before, the participle or past participle is the only non-personal form of the verb that has gender and number, it is not the same with the infinitive and the gerund. Some examples can clarify this peculiarity of the participle. In the infinitive, the verb to finish is to finish (because the infinitive is the same name that designates the verb) and in the gerund the verb to finish is the end. In participle, the final verb is finished, but it can also be modified in both its gender (masculine or feminine) and its number (singular or plural). Therefore, the finished participle becomes finished if the sentence requires it (the tasks have been finished).
One of the things that are difficult in relation to the past participle is that some of them are regular and some are irregular. The regular participles are those that end with worship or have gone (walking, left) and the irregular ones are those that violate this rule. The opening participle is open, that of putting is put and that of saying is said. When a person is already an adult and has an acceptable level of culture, there is generally no confusion with regular and irregular forms and they are used normally, although sometimes the speaker makes a mistakeand makes a momentary lapse, in this case a mistake, in the training of the participle would be to say that (she has decided to me, instead of her having told me). These types of errors are more typical of young children, who have not yet studied verbal irregularities.
