Just when we thought we had verbs figured out, we’re brought face-to-face with a new animal: the non-finite verbs. These words look similar to verbs we’ve already been talking about, but they act quite different than those other verbs. By definition, a non-finite verb cannot serve as the root of an independent clause. In practical terms, this means that they don’t serve as the action of a sentence. They also don’t have a tense. While the sentence around them may be past, present, or future tense, the non-finite verbs themselves are neutral. There are three types of non-finite verbs: gerunds, participles, and infinitives. Gerunds all end in -ing : skiing , reading , dancing , singing , etc. Gerunds act like nouns and can serve as subjects or objects of sentences. A participle is is used as an adjective or an adverb. There are two types of participle in English: the past and present participles. The present participle also takes the – ing form: (e.g., writing , singing , and raising ). The past participle typically appears like the past tense, but some have different forms: (e.g., written , sung and raised ). The infinitive is the basic dictionary form of a verb, usually preceded by to . Thus to go is an infinitive. CC licensed content, Original Revision and Adaptation of Wikipedia Content. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike CC licensed content, Shared previously Nonfinite verb. Provided by : Wikipedia. Located at : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonfinite_verb . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike