Joanna,
A minor quibble with comment to Ed. While I would not call the phrase in question a "gerundive" phrase either, it's because English doesn't have a gerundive. The gerundive, in the only case of it that I know of, is an adjectival form with a meaning of obligation or suitability. "Amanda", in Latin, means "lovable", and "delendum", in Cato the Elder's famous phrase, means "must be destroyed". English morphology has no such form/meaning pairing .
Like you, I also do not use the term "gerund" of the English -ing form, since, as you indicate, the difference between "playing" in Ed's sentence and "playing" in "Playing chess takes thought" is functional, not morphological.
I suspect that when most English grammarians use the term "gerundive" they are simply using a derived adjectival form of the noun "gerund" and don't mean anything like what the grammatical term means for a language, like Latin, that has such a morphological category.
Herb
Ed, a reason for not calling phrases like the one in "Playing in the
park, I saw Bill" gerundives is that they are not nominal. So far as I
understand, the conventional use of the term "gerund" in both
traditional grammar and linguistics (though linguists I know seldom use
that term) is to refer to the -ing form of the verb when it functions as
the head of a nominal, as in "Playing in the park is fun". I don't know
what value adding "-ive" has to this; it suggests that participial
phrases like the one in the first sentence above are somehow noun-like.
They aren't. They're modifiers. I can see them as adverbial modifiers
(reduced from "while I was playing in the park") or as noun modifiers,
which can derive from a re-analysis of "I was playing in the park" from
a sentence with past progressive to one with a copular verb and subject
complement. I can really feel my construal of the first sentence switch
between these two inpretations -- either describing "I" or setting the
action scene for the rest of the sentence.
The -ing participle commonly is used as a pre-noun modifier ("the
sleeping child") and in adverbial ways, as "He lost control in the ice
-- slipping and skidding this way and that" (although this second one
has the same two possible structural interpretations for me as your
example sentence). It seems to me that using "gerundive" for
non-nominal uses would be more confusing than sticking with "participle"
as a term for the form of the verb when it functions other than
nominally. Hence, your example sentence does, indeed, contain a
participial phrase. (Whether to call it a phrase or a clause is a
separate argument.)
This explanation was, of course, way more complex than I would use even
for my undergraduate students, let alone lower grades.
***************************************************
Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
English Department, Cal Poly State University
San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
Tel. 805-756-2184 ~ Dept. phone 805-756-2596
Dept. fax: 805-756-6374 ~ E-mail: [log in to unmask]
URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
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