Timeline for Is a gerund a part of speech?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
16 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jul 24, 2017 at 14:48 | comment | added | Araucaria - him | @LukeSawczak Much better. | |
| Mar 21, 2017 at 14:38 | comment | added | Luke Sawczak | Probably still not the best answer after my edit just now, but hopefully better. | |
| Mar 21, 2017 at 14:38 | history | edited | Luke Sawczak | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Reflecting comments
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| Mar 21, 2017 at 8:03 | comment | added | BillJ | A gerund in trad grammar occupies its own slot in the verb paradigm, sitting alongside the two other secondary (non-finite) forms “past participle” and “infinitive”. It belongs in the verb paradigm because, despite its being able to occur as a noun in certain constructions, it is essentially a verb-form. But in Present-day English, many authorities recognise just one inflectional form marked by the ing siffix and label it with the compound term “gerund-participle”, as there is no reason to give priority to one or other of the traditional terms. | |
| Mar 20, 2017 at 16:04 | comment | added | Araucaria - him | I've written a little hobby-horse answer post below :) | |
| Mar 20, 2017 at 16:04 | comment | added | Araucaria - him | @LukeSawczak "Don't be concerned about our eating" is ambiguous. It could be a noun or a gerund-particple form of the verb. Consider "Don't be concerned about our rapacious eating of the cake" (noun) and "Don't be concerned about our rapaciously eating the cake" (verb). | |
| Mar 20, 2017 at 15:54 | comment | added | Luke Sawczak | Well, some do call it a "noun infinitive" or something similar. :p I suppose there's a basis for an analysis whereby the gerund in "Don't be concerned about our eating" is a noun but the one in "Don't be concerned about our eating cake" is a verb, unintuitive as it feels, based on e.g. your adjectives and adverbs. At the end of the day, it's not straightforward to parse them and suggests more than one sort of thing that looks like a gerund, as others have mentioned. But if you formulate an answer that does better than my quick generalization, I'll upvote it... | |
| Mar 20, 2017 at 15:26 | comment | added | Araucaria - him | If you enter "eating hot peppers" there it will indeed give you an NP label for that clause. However, it will do that for any clause as opposed to phrase headed by a noun that's used as a Subject. So for example "to eat peppers is dangerous" will come up with "to eat peppers" as an NP. But not even people who subscribe to that kind of grammar will claim that the head word in "to eat peppers is dangerous" is a noun!! | |
| Mar 20, 2017 at 15:22 | comment | added | Araucaria - him | @LukeSawczak But in "I enjoyed his/the beautiful singing" the word "singing" is a noun, not a gerund!! (Sometimes referred to as a deverbal noun). | |
| Mar 20, 2017 at 13:41 | comment | added | Luke Sawczak | Yet without an object for the gerund ("I enjoyed his singing"), they all revert to NPs headed by Ns. So it would be fair to say that the parsers are inconsistent. Incidentally, gerunds can be modified by both adjectives and adverbs: "I enjoyed his beautiful singing" vs. "Eating hot peppers quickly is difficult." Perhaps that gives some clue as to a variable parsing... | |
| Mar 20, 2017 at 13:39 | comment | added | Luke Sawczak | Sorry, the first one should have been this. Tested again and all three work with the sentence "Eating hot peppers is difficult." These were meant to demonstrate that they treat the gerund as heading an NP (I realize that the first one refers to the gerund word itself by just that term—a shorthand that would no doubt contribute to the OP's confusion!) Interestingly enough, though, when the gerund is objective ("My dog likes eating sausage"), two of them parse a VP headed by a V and one of them parses an NP headed by a V (yikes). | |
| Mar 20, 2017 at 9:30 | comment | added | Araucaria - him | Gerunds are not nouns. They take direct objects and are modified by adverbs, not adjectives. The online parsers that you link to give those gerunds as verbs not nouns (the ones that the links seem to work for, that is). | |
| Mar 14, 2017 at 4:41 | comment | added | Luke Sawczak | Unintuitive as it might be, it's not an uncommon parsing. It is, for example, the consensus of several online parsers on that sentence: (1) (2) (3). There may be less common ways of making up an NP. | |
| Mar 14, 2017 at 3:25 | comment | added | Morphosyntax | I don't think a gerund could possibly be the head of an NP when it has its own arguments as in the example "eating hot peppers is difficult." The subject of the sentence is a whole clause with the gerund heading a VP, not just an NP. For brevity's sake, it could arguably be an NP when it has no arguments of its own. | |
| Mar 13, 2017 at 18:09 | history | edited | Luke Sawczak | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 295 characters in body
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| Mar 12, 2017 at 23:21 | history | answered | Luke Sawczak | CC BY-SA 3.0 |