Timeline for Is the {-ing} of the gerund a verbal inflectional suffix?
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| Mar 30, 2016 at 23:30 | comment | added | StoneyB on hiatus | No argument. All I say is that the ambiguity's there from the outset: as soon as you deploy the ing form as head of a phrase which acts in the syntactic role most commonly played by nouns it starts getting nouny. It gets nounier with adjectives and determiners and frank articles. But to my mind it entirely topples over into nominality, never stops being verby, too. ... And the same thing happens with the form, mutatis mutandis, when you deploy in an adjectival role and call it a 'participle'. | |
| Mar 30, 2016 at 22:39 | comment | added | Greg Lee | @StoneyB, The term "gerund" seems to cause nothing but confusion -- this is at least the third time I've been through a drawn out attempt to make clear the following point about these -ing nominalized forms, which syntacticians often call poss-ing nominalizations. And that point is this: the -ing form from the verb of the original sentence form is still a verb. Just a verb, nothing more. Whether the things you call "gerunds" have noun-like properties would of course depend on how you use that term. | |
| Mar 30, 2016 at 21:26 | comment | added | StoneyB on hiatus | I think gerund is one of those terms of which Kenneth Burke says "What we want is not terms that avoid ambiguity, but terms that clearly reveal the strategic spots at which ambiguities necessarily arise." -A Grammar of Motives | |
| Mar 30, 2016 at 16:56 | comment | added | TKR | The ambiguity together with the identity of form and meaning suggest to me that the distinction between gerunds and deverbal nouns is less than clear-cut. In any case, the broader point in the context of the OP is that (as per StoneyB's comments) gerunds clearly have some verblike features and some nounlike features; what this means about the inflection vs. derivation question isn't too clear to me, unless it's that this is one case where that dichotomy, too, becomes difficult to uphold. | |
| Mar 30, 2016 at 14:37 | comment | added | StoneyB on hiatus | @TKR Gerunds with objects and articles are less common than they once were but still acceptable, even in the colloquial register: "You all pretend like no one has any emotions, it's wrong to have them." Harleyetta, voice hoarse, throat hurting, said, “It's not the having them, it's the showing them.“ -Rita Mae Brown | |
| Mar 30, 2016 at 12:26 | comment | added | Greg Lee | @TKR, Yes, it's true that when there is nothing to disambiguate the construction, it's ambiguous. | |
| Mar 30, 2016 at 3:25 | comment | added | brass tacks | @TKR: actually, I looked into that a while ago because I had the same impression, but that doesn't seem to be true. Huddleston and Pullum unify the participles with some of what was traditionally classified as "gerunds," in their category called "gerund-participle." But, they don't classify all -ing forms as gerund-participles. I asked the following question on ELU about this topic: Is “programming” not a noun?; Greg Lee posted an answer there. | |
| Mar 30, 2016 at 2:49 | comment | added | TKR | Btw, if I recall correctly CGEL treats all the -ing forms (including participles!) as a single category, but I don't have the book handy and can't check the details. | |
| Mar 30, 2016 at 2:36 | comment | added | TKR | Well, OK; this seems like a mostly definitional question (and in earlier forms of English, for what that's worth, constructions like the swimming the Atlantic were actually acceptable). But then, accepting your distinction between gerunds and deverbal nouns, how are we to decide which one we're dealing with in e.g. Swimming is a great hobby? You can add an object, Swimming the Atlantic..., but you can just as easily add an adjective, e.g. Competitive swimming... | |
| Mar 29, 2016 at 22:58 | comment | added | Greg Lee | @TKR, No, gerunds do not fulfill any of my criteria for being nouns. Read the third paragraph of my answer. Your example The swimming is good here has the derived noun swimming, not a gerund. You can tell that by trying to add any of the tests for a real gerund: *"The swimming the Atlantic is difficult." *"The rapidly swimming is exhausting", and so on. // It is just not true that the head of every noun phrase is a noun -- there are many obvious counterexamples. | |
| Mar 29, 2016 at 22:42 | comment | added | TKR | On the other hand, gerunds do fulfill your criteria 1-2 for nounhood: The swimming is good here, There's good swimming here -- unless of course you argue that these aren't gerunds but something else. (And if swimming the Atlantic is a noun phrase, then by definition its head is a noun.) So I think @StoneyB is right to say that gerunds have qualities of both nouns and verbs. | |
| Mar 29, 2016 at 17:17 | history | answered | Greg Lee | CC BY-SA 3.0 |