You are telling a friend about your weekend at the seaside, without even a cloud. «The Sun has…» and here you stop. Shiny? Shiny? If neither of the two sounds good, there is a reason: the first form is no longer used and is today foreign to common use, while the second is not the past participle of shine.
With a periphrasis, conclude the sentence, explaining that the weather was on your side or that “the sun continued to shine” and overcome a gap in Italian grammar. Shine is part of the so-called defective verbs, all those verbs whose conjugation lacks moods, tenses or persons and, for example, exist in the present, simple future, imperfect, but not in the past participle and therefore in the compound tenses that use it (proximal past, past perfect, future perfect).
What are defective verbs
A verb is said defective (from Latin defect«come less») when its conjugation is incomplete: therefore some forms are missing that would be present in a “normal” verb. Among the most interesting – and challenging – cases is precisely the lack of past participle. Without this no compound tense can be constructed: no past tense (“I have shone”), no past tense (“I have shone”), no future perfect tense (“I will have shone”).
«Spleso» is a form that it never existed. As regards «shined», it should be noted that, as Treccani reports, some dictionaries record that past participle as a rare and antiquated form, which has now fallen into disuse. Today, that participle is no longer used.
Defective verbs should not be confused with irregular verbs: these have the participle, but it is different from what we would expect. The differences are at the level of endings, e.g. I’m Friuto, from Fritheking, it’s irregular. Irregulars also involve changes of roots as happens for example with go: you go, but they go. In defective verbs a specific form is missing.
Verbs that lack the past participle: examples
Among the verbs that in contemporary Italian are normally considered without the past participle we find, for example:
- shine (and shine)
- itch
- compete
- concern
- diverge
- settle
- exempt
- fervere
- loom
- insert
- succumb
- tanger
- urge
- vertere
- apply
Any attempt to find a past participle for these verbs produces uncertainty and results that cannot help but “sound bad”, precisely because they do not exist, or have fallen into disuse for years and years. The case of itch is among the most emblematic and everyday: as explained by theCrusca Academy, neither the present participle nor the past participle exist, and forms such as prduto, prurso or pruso are “absolutely incorrect”.
One might think that the term “different” is a past participle of diverge: however, diverge is also defective in the past tense (some dictionaries admit the possibility, but with rare use). As Crusca always points out, «the adjective diverse is not even etymologically related to divergere, since it derives from the Latin verb have fun (which is also the basis of Italian divertire)”.
Then there are defective verbs that survive almost only thanks to one of their forms becoming another word; for example tanger, understood as «touching» and «regarding» (“the question doesn’t bother me”). As a verb it is practically unusable in almost all its forms, yet its present participle exists, even if we use it as a noun: la tangentthe straight line that touches the circumference at a single point (or a sum of money used to bribe).
Why the language left these holes and how not to make mistakes
Why are there these holes? The first person responsible is the Latin origin of our language. There are for example defective verbs that entered Italian already «crippled»: for example, in the aforementioned case of diverge, the Latin verb was also defective vergĕre (from which it derives diverge), which only presented the theme of the present, but not those of the perfect and the supine (from whose evolution the forms also used to form our past participle derive).
The reasons why a verb has a defective conjugation cannot be traced back to a single cause. In some cases the limitation is linked to the history of the verb and its evolution in use; in others, certain forms may be attested but appear rare, ancient or foreign to contemporary Italian.
To get by, every day without even realizing it we implement the so-called periphrasisthat is, a turn of phrase, another way of saying something. If we insert a servile verb (duty, power) or support verb (continue, warn) in front of the defective verb, that’s it: for example, to get around the past participle of the verb succumbsuccumbed, no longer used, we can rely on a verb that has the participle, such as duty or continue. Not «I succumbed», but «I had to succumb”; not «I shone», but «the sun continued to shine”; not «I felt itchy», but «I have warned itching”.
