Finite verbs have a tense and can stand alone in a sentence. Non-finite verbs function as nouns or adjectives. Infinitives begin with “to,” gerunds end in “ing,” and participles end in “ed,” “en,” or “ing.” Finite verbs change form based on subject and tense, while non-finite verbs do not. A sentence must contain at least one finite verb.
A finite verb is a verb that has a grammatical tense and can stand alone as a verb in a sentence. Each sentence must include a finite, transitive, intransitive, or linking verb. In English, finite verbs typically end in “s” or “ed” or are uninflected, meaning they don’t have a suffix. The identifying trait of a finite verb in any language is that it always has a tense, and is therefore finite, or limited, by tense.
A finite verb can also be a verb phrase, which contains one or more auxiliary or axillary verbs plus a main verb, as in “The girls were hula-hooping”, where “they were hula-hooping” is the finite verb. In some languages, this construction is considered a linking verb with a participle, but English grammars typically classify the entire sentence as a finite verb.
Unlike finite verbs, which never have any role other than that of a verb, non-finite verbs, often called “verbals,” function as nouns or adjectives. The three types of non-finite verbs are gerunds, infinitives and participles. Gerunds are verbs that function like nouns and end in “ing” in English. Infinitives are verb phrases that begin with “to,” as in “to munch.” Participles are verbs that function like adjectives, usually ending in “ed”, “en” or “ing” in English.
To determine if an “ed” verb is finite, one should look at its role in the sentence. It is often easiest to discover a finite verb by a process of elimination; if it’s not one of the three unfinished shapes, it’s finished. In the sentence “Pedro cooked a chicken for dinner”, “baked” is not used as a noun, it is not preceded by “to”, and it is not used as an adjective; so it’s finished.
Some confusion can arise from verb forms ending in “ed,” which could be finite or non-finite. Again, his role in the ruling needs to be considered. For example, “Pedro had baked chicken for dinner” contains the same word form, “baked,” as the previous example. In this sentence the word “baked” is a participle because it functions as an adjective describing what kind of chicken Pedro ate, so it’s unfinished.
Another way to think of finite verbs is that they change their form based on the grammatical number and person of the subject of the sentence, as well as the tense of the verb. For example, the verb “steer” has different forms depending on who is driving and when: “I steer” has no inflection, while “He steers” ends in “s” and “We steered” ends in “ed”. The three types of non-finite verbs, however, do not change their form based on other words in the sentence.
In standard English grammar, a sentence must contain at least one finite verb, but may contain many or no unfinished verbs. The sentence “Jane wanted to splash in the wading pool” contains a finite verb, “wanted” and two non-finite verbs, “to splash” and “wading”.
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