What part of speech is "left" in this sentence?
What part of speech is "left" in the following sentence?
There was nothing left.
LEFT is the past participle form of the verb 'to leave' in the sense "remaining"
• Ther are only three cups of juice left.
••There was nothing left.
--In the above example "left" is past participle (verb-adjective) with a passive meaning; it means everything was exhausted.
Participles are verbs used as adjectives. Participles used as adjectives often come after the nouns they modify if joined by linking/copular verbs like 'be, become, seem, etc. When the past participle is used, the noun it describes is acted upon.
•I seem confused. ••The students are bored •••There was nothing left.
So "left" is a particpal adjective originated from verb 'to leave' used predicatively to mean 'remaining'.
To be precise, it is a postpositive use of adjective after the pronoun, 'Nothing'.
What is left? (There was nothing left.)
Two plausible options exist:
- Left could be a predicate adjective with was the linking verb and nothing the subject, OR...
- Left could be the main part of a passive voice verb, as in, "Nothing was left." Before changing this into the active voice, we would need to determine who or what the agent (the doer of the action) is. So, we might reword the sentence in the passive to say, "Nothing was left by the tornado." In the active, we could then say, "The tornado left nothing."