Question

Does a past participle always have a helping verb? What are examples of helping verbs?

Answer 1

Hint: This question is from the topic of tenses. Other than the simple past, present and future tenses one can also form sentences that are the perfect, continuous and the perfect continuous tense with the knowledge of the participle forms of the verbs.

Complete answer:
The past participle is a form of a verb which is used when we want to frame a sentence in the past perfect tense. The past perfect tense indicates an action that has been completed or was taking place before a specified time. It is different from a simple past tense as the simple past tense does not indicate a specific time before which the action was taking place.
For e.g. I ate the cake before my friends came home. This is the simple past tense and is very straightforward.

I had eaten the cake by the time my friends came home. This is the past perfect tense. Here, the cake was eaten before an important action i.e. the coming of the friends.
In the simple past tense, the ‘coming of friends’ is not as important as it is in the ‘past perfect tense’

In the past perfect tense, we see that the verb ‘eaten’ is the past participle form of the verb ‘eat’. It is also preceded by a helping verb i.e. ‘had’. Therefore, we can conclude that while framing a sentence in the past perfect tense, we must use the participle form of the verb and it should be preceded by a helping verb like have, had and has.
For e.g. I have eaten the cake (present perfect), I had eaten the cake (past perfect) and I will have eaten the cake (future perfect). All these sentences use the past participle form of the verb and are accompanied by a helping verb.

Therefore, we can conclude by saying that YES, the past participle forms of the verbs always have a helping verb i.e. whenever a sentence is being framed in the perfect tense.
Some examples of helping verbs that are commonly used with the past participle form are; have, has, is, am, be, was, were, etc.

Note: Just like the past participle form, there is also a present participle form of a verb. For e.g. eating, sitting, etc. The present participle form is also called the progressive form. It is used to frame sentences in the continuous tense. For e.g. I am eating (present continuous), I was eating (past continuous) and I will be eating (future continuous).