participialnominal

A participial nominal is a nominal expression formed from a present or past participle that functions as a noun within a sentence. It refers to people or things characterized by the action or state expressed by the participle, and it can serve as the head of a noun phrase.

In English, participial nominals commonly arise from both -ing participles and past participles. Examples include the living, the missing, the wounded, the known, and the elderly. In sentences, they behave like nouns: they can be subjects or objects and can take determiners or be modified by adjectives. For instance, The wounded were evacuated after the explosion; The living have rights; The unknown remains a challenge for researchers. Although many participial nominals are plural without a corresponding noun (the wounded, the living), some contexts allow more specific forms such as the wounded man or the known quantity.

Syntactically, participial nominals are distinct from verbal forms: they function as noun phrases rather than as verbs or adjectives within larger predicates. They often denote a class or group with a shared property, rather than a single event. They can appear in formal or journalistic styles and are productive across many dialects of English, though usage may be more restrained or idiomatic with certain participles.

Cross-linguistically, many languages have similar nominalizations based on participles, yielding expressions like der Verletzte in German or de gewonden in Dutch, which function as noun phrases referring to people characterized by the described state or action.

Overall, participial nominals provide a compact way to reference groups defined by a participial property, functioning within the noun phrase with noun-like syntactic behavior and a broadly referential meaning.