The Present Passive Participles
Present passive participles, too, are formed only from imperfective verbs, since they refer to an activity which is currently taking place or which repeatedly takes place. The simplest way to form the present passive participle is to begin with the 1st person plural form of the verb and simply add the adjective endings to itno suffix is necessary. Thus, if "we read" is (мы) читаем the present passive participle of читай- then is читаемый "being read". The present passive participles of люби- is derived from (мы) любим in the same way: любимый, любимая, любимое, любимые "beloved, favorite".
The accent falls on the same syllable of first conjugation verbs as it does in the first person plural. However, for second conjugation verbs, it falls on the same syllable as it does in the 1st person singular: произвожу, производим : производимый "being produced".
The present passive participle has two major functions.
First, it expresses action not carried out by the noun it modifies, but which is carried out on the noun it modifies. Thus человек, читающий газету means "a person reading the paper" but газета, читаемая человеком is "a paper being read by a person".
This form also has the meaning of adjectives on -able in English and is used most widely with the negative prefix не- to express the quality of resistance to certain processes. In this function it is derived from perfective and imperfective stems.
|1st Plural||Gloss||Participial Adjective||Gloss|
|обходим||we go around||(не)обходимый||(un)avoidable|
Notice in the following examples that, unlike English which allows participial phrases only after the noun they modify, participial phrases in Russian may be placed before or after the noun.
|машина, которую производят в России
the car that is produced in Russia
|машина, производимая в России
the car (being) produced in Russia
|о сцене, которая описывается в книге
the scene, which is described in the book
|о сцене описываемой в книге
the scene described in the book
|условия, которые все требуют
conditions that everyone demands
|всеми требуемые условия
conditions demanded by everyone
|газета, которую читает молодёжь
the paper that young people read
|читаемая молодёжью газета
the paper read by young people
|Now Try a Few Yourself|
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