Bruce,
I find these responses very interesting. I hope the rest of the list isn’t getting frustrated.
As you know, the verb plus ing after a be verb auxiliary is quite often ambiguous. “Interesting” is certainly most likely an adjective in the instance you
give, but if I give an example like “she is sleeping” or “she is painting,” I think most people would see these (is sleeping, is painting) are present progressive verb phrases. This is pretty much my point: that the ing form of the verb has a single
name (participle) but carries out a number of functions. Adjective is one of them.
This is true to some extent in noun phrases as well. I have a friend whose first novel is titled “Dreaming maples.” In this case, “dreaming” could be a transitive
verb taking “maples” as its object. It could be an intransitive verb, denoting the maples as dreaming. It could also tell us what kind of maples we are dealing with; in this case, maples that are suitable for dreaming. We don’t have that ambiguity with “sinking,”
but a “fishing boat” could be a boat that is doing some fishing (in the process of fishing) or a boat that can be classified as a boat suitable for fishing, which would make “fishing” much more noun like in the way it acts. Context might decide it. In the
case of my friend, she was perfectly happy to have a number of meanings available with her title.
Within systemic functional linguistics (I’m not sure about others), perception verbs are thought of as taking subject bearing clauses as their object. In
“I saw the ship sinking” or “I saw the ship sink,” they would treat “the ship sinking” and “the ship sink” as subject bearing nonfinite clauses. The verb would be very much a verb. That might be clearer in cases where the predicate is long enough for explicit
verb complements: “I saw the ship ram the dock and sink slowly into the harbor.” For more cognitive verbs, the structure would be equally clause like, but with the finite added. “I believe the ship was sinking.” “I thought the ship sank.” I don’t see anything
to be gained by thinking of these as adjectives, though context can pressure that. “Which car did you see?” “I saw the car sitting in the driveway.” “What did you see the car doing?” “I saw the car sitting in the driveway.” The same sort of ambiguity can
be present.
There are two ways of looking at the hybrid structures sometimes generated by the possessive. “His leaving the ship bothered me.” One is that “his” helps
us locate the missing subject for the following clause. The other is that “his” helps us determine which leaving the ship is in focus. (I’m certainly not bothered by the fact that the passengers left.) One construes what follows as clause, the other as a
bit noun like. It is a bit hybrid as a structure.
You notice, though, that I have gotten this far without using the term “gerund.” I am simply talking about the different ways in which the –ing form of
the verb behaves within discourse and the ambiguity that sometimes results. Does a term like” gerund” add anything to this? Usually it’s defined as a verb acting like a noun, but what does acting like a noun mean and what do we do when it only partly acts
like a noun in some contexts? One frequent area of confusion is the clause like structure in a role like subject. “Stealing that pie got him into trouble.” To me, “Stealing that pie” is a nonfinite clause containing a transitive verb. The same would be true
with “the guy stealing that pie is my brother.” The nonfinite clause has a different role within the sentence, but its internal structure remains the same.
We can continue to call a noun a noun even when it is in a modifying role in a noun phrase or even acting adverbially. “He left yesterday.” We don’t
need to give it a different name for each of its functions. To me, it seems easier to talk about the present participle form of the verb and the various ways it acts within discourse.
Craig
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Bruce Despain
Sent: Friday, January 20, 2012 12:28 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Gerund phrase v. gerund--grammar question
Craig,
Interesting. This is an adjective formed by adding the -ing suffix to the verb
interest. When we say, "that is interesting" it is not normally interpreted as an imperfect participle, since that would be taking it as forming the progressive aspect of the verb
interest. Instead it serves as a predicate adjective. R.A. Close has a list of 36 such adjectives serving either in attribute or predicate position. One characteristic he mentions is that it
is gradable, i.e., can be preceeded by very.
Sinking in "leaving a sinking ship" is the imperfect participle describing the activity
of the ship that the captain was leaving. This is positioned like any attributive adjective to stand before the noun modified, but is not gradable.
Sinking in "they watched the ship sinking" has not changed its part of speech, it is still
an adjective, but now as an attribute complement. It is the ship that is being watched, and the activity it is engaged in modifies or completes its meaning.
Sink in "they watched the ship
sink" is the bare infinitive, a noun form selected by the verb
watch. It serves as an attribute complement. This sentence is virtually synonymous with the one formed with the adjective form in -ing as attribute complement.
Sinking in "they watched the ship's sinking" now makes the possessive case modify a noun
formed using the -ing. The ship is a subject to the activity of the verb. This is what is being watched: the event that the ship is engaged in. If I keep the ship in the subjective case without a marker, the sentence is identical to the one above and actually
will be seen to allow either interpretation. Most will say that they will not be misunderstood in either case. When the (deep) subject is possessive (or subjective) case we are concerned with a gerund.
Certain verbs like stop, remember, forget, try, take either an infinitive or a gerund as object, but with
a different interpretation.
Because the gerund of the last example refers to an abstract idea, we must have an abstract subject to make it serve in that form as an attribute complement, "The vast audience made
the results of the debate a sinking in the polls." Providing it with an article gives it an unambiguous interpretation as a noun. Yet there are a number of verbs where the -ing forming a noun has a meaning different from the noun that denotes an activity
or event. These are not gerunds: a feeling, leavings, a writing, a beginning, because they refer to the result of the activity. Sometimes the presence of the article is required, "Give him a good listening to." Maybe the jury is still out on whether these
turns of phrase are properly grouped with the gerunds, but the fact that they refer to the activity seems conclusive.
I'm not sure I can answer your question as directly as you desire.
[Maybe I'm up in the night, but I think I'll reconsider my use of the term "supine" for the case-imposed gerund. In Latin supines are passives.]
Bruce
--- [log in to unmask] wrote:
From: "Hancock, Craig G" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Gerund phrase v. gerund--grammar question
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2012 03:51:23 +0000
Bruce,
I want to thank you for taking much care and answering me so patiently. I'm still having trouble understanding what structures you would apply "gerund" to,
perhaps because you only have one example among those comments, the one from Greenbaum. Would you limit its use to that sort of hybrid structure with both noun and verb elements? ("The captain's leaving the sinking ship was shameful.") I can see the usefulness
of that, though it also seems to me much more narrow (and precise) than the way the term is usually applied (as is clear from Scott's opening examples.)
I have always thought of the present participle as a verb form, not exclusively as an adjective. It can function in an adjective slot, but it can also appear
in finite verb phrases, as the head of noun phrases, and as the head of predicate like structures that can sometimes act like noun phrases, sometimes like modifiers. I think I am not alone in this. I'm not sure what you mean by "accident of history." "The
captain is leaving the sinking ship with passengers still aboard." It seems natural to me that we are able to make that activity the focus of another statement. "Leaving the sinking ship was outrageous." We are able to report an event as ongoing, but are
also able to conceive of the event as a whole thing that we can make comment on in some way. It's not just history that's involved, but an overlap of structure that allows us to make different kinds of statements about the same occurrence. It may be ongoing;
it may be done; it may be bandied about as an ongoing topic.
To me, present participle is a form. It has a number of manifestations. I think this is the first time I have heard it applied solely to the -ing form used
as an adjective.
I would echo a point Karl made earlier. It's much more important to be able to focus in on how these structures are working than it is to name them. As commonly
used, "gerund" seems to get in the way of that.
Craig
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English
Grammar [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Stahlke, Herbert [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2012 1:45 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Gerund phrase v. gerund--grammar question
Bruce,
Thanks for the correction. Tense/lax is not one of the best defined phonological features since it involves a complex of gestures that are different with different sounds.
A lot of speakers do tense or raise /I/ to /i/ before /ng/. I’m not one of them. The raising before /n/ does sound unusual, although I’ve certainly heard it with British speakers in the word “been.” I haven’t listened closely for sin/sing types of contrast
though. Sounds like we both have some unusual vowel features. I have phonemic Canadian raising in pairs like “kind” (adj) with the lower diphthong and “kind” (noun) with a raised diphthong.
Herb
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Bruce Despain
Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2012 1:24 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Gerund phrase v. gerund--grammar question
Herb,
Your note addressed to Karl was intended for me (Bruce).
The palatalization of [I] to [i] occurs ineveitably with my "ee" phoneme before the alveolar "n." Tense and lax are not contrasted for me here.
The velarization of [I] before the velar "n" may well be a separate phone for the same phoneme, but it seems to be the lax allophone.
It is of some interest that I have reversed the rolls of the two -ing suffixes, but so be it. Maybe my mentors taught me wrong, maybe I hear it wrong, maybe this phenomenon needs more
study in the various dialects. I have not done research in the literature, just tried to analyze carefully what was going on with my tongue in the oral cavity when I speak, and how the various interpretations change when I do so. I have a western dialect
developed (corrupted) in urban Utah, but not that of the rural folks, which is much like Gov. Palin. I have heard some actors on British TV using the "een" sounds for the imperfect participle and found it strange to my ear.
Bruce Despain
--- [log in to unmask] wrote:
From: "Stahlke, Herbert" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Gerund phrase v. gerund--grammar question
Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:41:53 -0500
Karl,
Just a tangential note. You wrote:
, in my ideolect the -ing of the gerund "rolling logs into the river" has an "ee" + n-sound, whereas the -ing of the imperfect participle "rolling logs into the river" has
the "ee" + eng sound. The imperfect participle is a subclass of participle and participle is a subclass of adjective.
piqued my interest for a couple of reasons. First, your use of –n in the gerund vs. –ng in the participle reflects but reverses the history of the forms.
Historically the adjectival form was marked by the suffix –nd, and the final –d was so generally elided in speech that it was ultimately dropped. The –ng ending was a nominalizing suffix with a number of meanings. For most speakers, the use of the –n form
and the –ng form became a sociolinguistic variable, in fact, the most widely studied sociolinguistic variable in English. What makes your idiolect curious is that your morphosyntactic distinction between them reflects their sources but in mirror image.
What surprised me most was your use of “ee,” which I take to represent [i], not [I]. There has been discussion of this on other lists and blogs, and “ee” occurs
frequently in –ing but not in –in. The velar articulation of –ng tends to raise the lax [I] to [i], but the alveolar /n/ does not do that. You appear to have generalized the tense vowel across the two forms.
Herb
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Bruce Despain
Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2012 3:14 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Gerund phrase v. gerund--grammar question
Karl,
Thank you for your clarification. The assignment of a word out of context to a particular part of speech has been the subject of a number of communications before on this
listserve. There is also the assignment of a word (out of context) to a particular part of phrase, which ought to be discussed as well. I must admit that I have misunderstood the "gerundial noun." In my mind it is a
gerund. It seems to be the form that brings almost all of the syntax of the verb with it. This was my point in labelling it as an analytically "transient" verb. As a part of phrase
it may be subject, object, and other syntactic functions that a noun clause might have and is therefore a variety of noun. It was in this sense that the term
supine was suggested, on the basis of Latin, which requires their gerund forms with similar syntax to show case. The case is what indicates its particular syntactic function (what is
governing it).
The nouns that look like gerunds, but do not have the full syntax, are what I was pointing out as abstract nouns. If subjects or objects are to be added to them, it must
be by the process of morphological compounding. "Leaving home" is a supine, whereas "a home leaving" would be an abstract noun derived from the verb
leave. This form is also commonly called a gerund, but doesn't have the verbal complements. Thus supine is a subclass of gerund, some abstract nouns are a subclass of gerund, and a gerund is
a subclass of noun.
There is a problem with the position that two constructions are not really distinct if they only differ in their grammatical function. The difficulty is in what the grammatical
function is defined as. If it is defined by the grammatical context that they are in, then nouns and pronouns may be the same. But if it is defined by the grammatical context they license, then gerunds and some abstract nouns may be the same. Gerunds are
noun forms of a verb while participles are adjective forms. In their context they are different, yet the context that is in them may be the same. Furthermore, in my ideolect the -ing of the gerund "rolling logs into the river" has an "ee" + n-sound, whereas
the -ing of the imperfect participle "rolling logs into the river" has the "ee" + eng sound. The imperfect participle is a subclass of participle and participle is a subclass of adjective.
Sincerely,
Bruce
--- [log in to unmask] wrote:
From: Karl Hagen <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Gerund phrase v. gerund--grammar question
Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2012 10:51:02 -0800
Bruce,
Just to clarify, I don't conflate gerundial nouns with other -ing forms traditionally called gerunds. Nor do I think that gerundial nouns must have articles to be nouns. Of course you can usually add one (e.g., "the log rolling"), and the grammaticality of
that construction is evidence of noun-hood.
My points are these:
First, there's no principled reason to say that "log rolling" is headed by a noun and "the rolling of logs" is headed by a gerund. In both cases, "rolling" passes all the tests of noun-hood. We don't say that "wall" is a different part of speech when it occurs
in the phrase "a stone wall" as opposed to the phrase "a wall of stone." To assert that "rolling" is not a noun in this case makes a pointless distinction. It is a noun derived from a gerund, whether it is well established or transitory, as you put it. (The
problems with "the annual log rolling into the river" aren't explained by calling "rolling" a gerund. They exist with other deverbal nouns in the same situation, for example, I find "the annual stone toss into the river" equally infelicitous. Something else
is going on here.)
Second, to call such instances of "rolling" (i.e., the gerundial nouns) gerunds lumps them together with an entirely different syntactic construction ("rolling logs"). I don't see any explanatory benefit to this grouping. Sure, they share a derivational morphology,
but that's it. When I do use the term "gerund," I don't include gerundial nouns, and I certainly never call them participles.
Third, once you've separated the gerundial nouns from the traditional category of gerund, there is very little left to distinguish gerunds ("Rolling logs into the river is fun") from participles ("Rolling logs into the river, the lumber company saved on transportation
costs"). It's here that I often simplify with students and call these participles. I take the position that two constructions are not really distinct if they only differ in their grammatical function. After all, we still call a noun phrase a noun phrase whether
it is functioning as a subject or an object.
Regards,
Karl
On 1/17/2012 7:12 PM, Bruce Despain wrote:
Karl,
I would definitely cringe to intentionally conflate the transient adjective in -ing (imperfect participle) with the transient noun in -ing (gerund). Even though the constructions
are similar, the transient adjective modifies a noun in the sentence, whereas the transient noun serves one of the noun functions.
When there is no article, the noun form (gerund) is no less a verbal noun. There are many abstract nouns that do not have an article; they take a null article. And then
I can see you cringe again, because it is so hard to take a null form as being present. There is no dispute that there are nouns similar to gerunds that do not have the verbal complements. They are just like mass nouns, but do not refer to substances.
Man is mortal. (count noun used as an abstract noun, referring to a set of objects)
Grammar is fun. (an indefinite abstract count noun)
Recreation is fun. (an indefinite abstract count noun)
Log rolling is fun. (an indefinite abstract count noun)
We understand that this last example is not a gerund, but a noun derived from a gerund. We may say "the annual log rolling is fun," but not *"the annual log rolling into
the river is fun." (Some people may be persuaded to accept this one.) The gerund would be, "the annual rolling of logs into the river is fun." Thus there may or may not be a definite article.
What about "the (rapid) river log rolling"? Maybe this kind of modification on an abstract noun derived from a gerund is allowed (the adjective but not the prepositional
phrase). This seems to be "behaving like nouns internally," whatever that means. My grammar treats of two levels of noun phrase modification: classification and identification. These two kinds of noun phrase modification seem to be fair game for the gerund
as well. The abstract noun is rarely used to identify a specific event.
Bruce
---
[log in to unmask] wrote:
From: Karl Hagen <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Gerund phrase v. gerund--grammar question
Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2012 08:48:40 -0800
Like Bruce, I think that there are definitional issues at the core of your question. I see your examples as an illustration that the traditional understanding of "gerund" (which would, indeed, cover all your examples) doesn't adequately capture what's going
on here.
Your examples with "the" are nouns. Not only do they take a determiner and a prepositional phrase as a complement (both characteristics of nouns), but they also take adjectival modification, as in "the rapid waving of the baby's legs..." or "the annual rolling
of logs into the river." You can even make them plural, given the right semantic framework: "He has participated in three runnings of the bulls." The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language calls these "gerundial nouns," (IOW, nouns derived from gerunds).
Your examples without "the" do not behave like nouns internally, even though the whole phrase can fill a slot normally occupied by a noun phrase. They fail the above tests for noun-hood:
*the rolling logs into the river
*rapid rolling logs into the river
On the other hand, they pass verb tests, taking a noun phrase complement like transitive verbs, and accepting modification by adverbs ("rapidly rolling logs into the river"). In short, this type of "gerund" behaves almost exactly like a participle. Indeed,
unless the gerund/participle has a subject, they are exactly alike.
In short, the traditional label of "gerund" lumps together two classes of words with very different behavior, which to my mind makes it not useful as an analytical category.
With my students, I tend to soft-pedal, or even ignore, the terminology here. I dislike the CGEL term "gerund-participle" just because it's unwieldy, but have nothing better to offer. I'll often just call it a participle and ignore the gerund part, although
the pedant in me cringes a little bit each time I do that. I focus on getting them to see that the -ing words can sometimes behave as nouns and sometimes as verbal participles. What's essential to me is getting them to see how to test the difference.
Karl
On 1/16/2012 12:02 PM, Scott Woods wrote:
Dear List,
Would you characterize "the waving of the baby's legs from the buggy" as a gerund phrase in the following sentence? "Susan could see the flash of her teeth, laughing, and the waving of the baby's legs from
the buggy." It soesn't seem to be one to me, since it can't operate as a participial phrase in another sentence. Would you agree? Why do some gerunds take an article and others not? In the following pairs, the first seems to me to be a gerund phrase and the
second not. Is this right? What is the principle behind why some take an article and other don't?
Rolling logs into the river was fun.
The rolling of the logs into the river was annoying.
Eating oatmeal is boring.
The eating of the oatmeal has begun.
Running with the bulls is fun.
The running of the bulls has begun.
Growing vegetables is fun.
The growing of the vegetables was left to me.
Thanks,
Scott Woods
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