ABSTRACT
Unlike the adjective and the passive, the verbal -ant forms are not generally considered likely candidates for syntactic borrowing. The two verbal -ant forms can be seen as complementary because the present participle functions as the adjectival form of the verb whereas the gérondif functions as its adverbial form. Henrichsen still represents the strongest proponent of the argument that there is only one verbal -ant form in French, distinct from the de-verbal adjective because it is morphologically invariable. The results of the investigation of global influence were unequivocal: the corpus contained no innovative constructions involving the verbal -ant forms. Selective influence, on the other hand, was seen to affect form and frequency and the data all point to the same contact effect: the distribution of the two verbal -ant forms has been altered by influence from the original dispatches as a result of the formal equivalence of the English and French present participles.
