Talk:Gerund

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Contents 1 Stop V-ing vs. stop to V 2 Use of the gerund in conditional clauses 3 Mistake in section 1? 4 Latin 5 Gerunds vs. Participles 6 Gerunds vs. Participles 2 7 Is all this encyclopedic? 8 I stopped to smoke 9 Flawed example: "go on V-ing" vs. "go on to V" 10 Infinitives as Gerunds 11 Bit of self-reference in the intro 12 Question about prepositions and gerunds

[edit] Stop V-ing vs. stop to V

"forget, remember, stop" followed by to-V or Ving:

Surely 'to-V' after stop is an infinitive of purpose which is independent of the verb. It can be used with many verbs:

• I came to learn.
• I write to make money.
• I eat to live.
• I live to eat.
• I dress to kill.
• I shoot to kill.
• etc.

Perhaps 'stop' should be deleted, and a note about infinitive of purpose added, somewhere. Irpond 08:37, 16 April 2004 (UTC)

to is not generally analysed as an "infinitive of purpose". According to most syntactic theories it's just a tenseless auxilluary verb. When used as an adjunct rather than an object (as in your examples), an infinitive clause has a purposeful interpretation, e.g. "I came to learn" means roughly "I came in order that I might learn". However, in examples like "I forgot to eat", the infinitive clause "to eat" is not an adjunct, it is the object of the verb forgot. This is why it no longer has the purposeful interpretation, i.e. it doesn't mean "I forgot in order that i might eat". Note that in all your examples, the verb could have an object in addition to the adjunct infinitival clause: "I came here to learn", "I write novels to make money", "I eat food to live", etc., whereas this is not possible in a sentence like "I forgot to come". Cadr

Right. So shouldn't 'stop' be deleted here? As you point out, "I've stopped to smoke" could be "I've stopped work to smoke." Irpond 13:16, 16 April 2004 (UTC)

Oh I see what you mean, sorry. Yes, let's delete it...Cadr

OK I've deleted them. Might be good to add a note about sentences like "I stopped to smoke" as you suggested in your first comment (which I misunderstood quite a lot, sorry). Cadr

Thanks. Now I can sleep with a clear(er) conscience. Irpond 13:44, 16 April 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Use of the gerund in conditional clauses

When used in conditional clauses, the to-infinitive is used, and never the gerund.

For example:

It began to rain. or It began raining.

I love to sleep. or I love sleeping.

I would like to go there. (not going)

Is this some sort of prescriptive degree from on high? I don't see anything wrong with saying "I would like going there." It is a little awkward and would probably only come up in a discussion of a conditional or hypothetical situation, but I don't think it is ungrammatical. Bkonrad | Talk 12:47, 16 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I agree, it seems factually inaccurate. Cadr

Yes. "If I were bolder, I would begin/continue/start editing this article" seem perfectly natural, if not preferable. Perhaps 'would hate/like/love/prefer' are usually followed by the to-infinitive. Irpond 14:06, 16 April 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Mistake in section 1?

Hi. According to the Online Writing Lab at Purdue, "-ing" words function either as adjectives, in which case they're called present participles, or as nouns, in which case they're called gerunds.

In your first section, "Tenses of the Gerund", I think all the examples function as adjectives: "Cutting the rope" and "Having cut the rope" describe the person, and "Being cut" and "Having been cut" describe the rope. So they're present participles, not gerunds.

Do you agree? -Zac.

Hi². Zac: Whether cutting the rope is a gerund or not depends on where you put it: in "You are cutting the rope", cutting is a participle; in "I have no objection to your cutting the rope", it's a gerund.

But I have another problem with Section 1: it says,

'Properly speaking, the English gerund only occurs in the present tense. The gerund cannot occur in any other tenses. All other verbal nouns in English are expressed with the infinitive. For example, "to have loved and lost is better than not to have loved at all."'

First of all, there's nothing incorrect about the gerundive paraphrase of the example: "Having loved and lost is better than not having loved at all." Second, isn't that having loved a gerund in the present perfect? In English that's generally considered a different tense from present tense, so there's another problem with the simple statement that gerunds are present-tense only. Compare "I have no objection to your cutting the rope" and "I have no misgivings about your having cut the rope." --tc

[edit] Latin

This article focuses exclusively on the English gerund. That's all well and good, but if you try to link to gerundive in a discussion of the Latin gerundive (not quite the same as the gerund), it brings you here. We need to have a discussion of gerunds in other languages, and we need to remove the gerundive redirect. --69.245.192.52 00:47, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I second this. I searched wikipedia for 'gerundive' expecting to find something other than 'gerund'. This redirect is false and misleading, as is the use of the word 'gerundive' throughout the article to mean 'pertaining to the gerund'.

--benjamindees

The redirect from gerundive seems to have been removed, and I just went through and changed "gerundive" to "gerund" everywhere in this article. There's still the problem that this article doesn't mention any other languages, though honestly, I'm not sure if any other languages have "gerunds." (Other languages with multiple different verbal nouns are usually said to have multiple different infinitives.) Any thoughts? Ruakh 06:10, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

While I am by no means an authority (still very far from fluent, in fact), it appears that Japanese has gerundial forms (at least, that is how my study text explicitly refer to certain grammatical forms... I came here in fact to brush up on my understanding of precisely what "gerund" was) Nevermind. It appears to me now that my text is using 'gerund' to refer more to participle verbs, and even makes the comment "We call it gerund so as to make concepts clearer, but it very often often works differently to [sic] the English gerund". The upshot is that I don't know after all whether Japanese has true gerundial forms or not.--Tenmiles 07:47, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Gerunds vs. Participles

I second the suggestion that in the sentence "having x'ed, I went home", "having X'ed" is not a gerund. It is quite clearly a participle, since it modifies the subject of the sentence, I. 24.12.166.84 03:55, 18 June 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Gerunds vs. Participles 2

"Watching golf Susan thinks is tedious." English? OSV? --Henrygb 17:12, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

It's a topicalised phrase. For example, it could be embedded in the following context: "Susan likes watching cricket, I admit, but watching GOLF, Susan thinks is tedious". Slightly awkward in most contexts, but I'm sure you can find examples like it in corpora. Cadr 20:37, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be better to put it as 'Watching golf is tedious thinks Susan'? Mikkel 01:00, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Why not just 'Susanne thinks watching golf is tedious'? 216.232.63.213 18:25, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

Because that's not an example of gerund? --Tenmiles 07:49, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

Well, it's still an example of a gerund; the problem is that it's not an example of topicalizing a gerund by moving it to the front of a sentence, which is the point of the section that example is in. Ruakh 13:14, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

Can someone help me (I am, unfortunately, neither an apt nor studied linguist) understand? Wouldn't "watching" in the example I replied to be as much a verb as "running" or "sleeping"? I am not challenging your statement, merely attempting to better understand gerund and what makes that particular use a gerund. --Tenmiles 01:49, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

A gerund is a verb; specifically, in English at least, it's a verb ending in -ing that's used as a noun (i.e., it's the subject, direct object, or indirect object of a verb, or the object of a preposition, or a noun complement). This is distinguished from a present participle, which is also a verb, and which is identical in form, but which is used as an adjective. Watching, running, and sleeping are all gerunds, and they're all present participles as well; in Susan is watching golf, watching golf is an adjective describing Susan, and hence a present participle phrase, whereas in Susan hates watching golf, watching golf is the direct object of hates, and hence a gerund phrase. Does that make any sense? Ruakh 02:33, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

"watching golf is the direct object of hates, and hence a gerund phrase. Does that make any sense?" -- Yes, in fact, it does. Thanks. I think I understand it a bit more clearly now. My impression of what qualified as a gerund was too limited. --Tenmiles 07:27, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Is all this encyclopedic?

I question whether all the information in the article is really encyclopedic. Most of the information under Verb patterns with the gerund seems better suited to Wiktionary (in the form of usage notes at the relevant verbs); and while some the information in Some differences between gerunds and the present participle does seem encyclopedic, the section currently reads like a list of tricks for distinguishing the two — something you'd expect in a study sheet, perhaps, but not in an encyclopedia. (Incidentally, some of the verbs listed Verb patterns with the gerund actually take present participles: "go on," for example.) Ruakh 23:38, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

From the point of view of a linguist, I don't see these as "tricks" but as facts about English grammar. Word classes are, after all, defined by their distributions. However, whether facts about English grammar are encyclopedic is an open question so far as I can see (though I guess the absolute basic facts, such as the fact that English is poorly inflected and has canonical SVO word order, obviously are encyclopedic?) Cadr 14:30, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Well, first of all, I didn't say that the information in that section was unencyclopedic, only that the section reads like a list of tricks. I mean, the first sentence of the section is "The term 'gerund' is sometimes used incorrectly to mean any word ending with 'ing'"; I find it hard not to see an implied "This list will help you determine whether a given 'ing' word is in fact a gerund."

But the bigger thing, I guess — which I didn't actually mention before, but was on the tip of my finger — is that most of these are really just differences between nouns and adjectives in English. It might be worthwhile to note that you can do these things with gerunds, especially the "noun phrase paraphrases" one, but I don't think it's worthwhile to present this as a difference between gerunds and participles, rather than simply as a fact about gerunds.

Ruakh 15:54, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

I don't see that the distinction paralells the noun/adjective distinction, since non-gerundive -ing forms aren't adjectives. Can you explain further? Cadr 20:38, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

Re: "[...] non-gerundive -ing forms aren't adjectives.": I don't know what you mean by this. By all accounts, English's -ing ending marks both gerunds, which are verbal nouns, and present participles, which are verbal adjectives. Do you have a different understanding? If so, please elaborate! (Also, this is a side note, but I don't suppose you'd be willing to stop using gerundive to mean gerundial? It's not wrong to so — Webster's, at least, says that gerundive can indeed be used to mean gerundial — but it's terribly confusing, at least for me, because gerundive's principal meaning is somewhat related but really quite different; see Gerundive. Thanks in advance!) Ruakh 21:08, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

I don't know what a "verbal adjective" is supposed to be. Present particple -ing forms behave in all respects as verbs and in no respects as adjectives, just like past participles. (For example, you can't modify them by "very": "* I am very asking you to leave".) It may be the traditional terminology to say that they're in some sense adjectival, but it's just plain wrong and doesn't explain anything about the difference betweeen gerunds and present participles.

Point taken re "gerundive". Cadr 21:18, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

Both present and past participles function in many respects as adjectives. You're right that they don't generally get modified by very, but that's true of most adjective constructs that center around non-adjectives: "* a man very who is wet", "* a man very at work". They definitely do modify nouns: "We passed three men wearing red"; "We went to the zoo and saw a man-eating tiger"; "He made an infuriating assumption"; etc.

There are some cases where -ing verb forms (gerunds? participles?) are used where other nouns/adjectives couldn't; "to keep verbing" is different from "to keep noun", and "* to keep adjective" doesn't exist (except in certain fixed expressions, such as keep cool and keep warm, and when an object is implied, such as in set yolk and white aside; keep separate). However, I think these are the minority.

Ruakh 23:30, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

OK. "a man-eating tiger" is an instance of an adjectival use of an -ing form, but in those cases its not a present participle, it's a verbally derived adjective (like "planned" in "a planned economy"). You can see that it's functioning in a fundamentally different way from a present participle from the impossibility of compound present participles ("* I am man-eating Bill"). Ordinary present participle -ing forms, which are compared to gerundive -ing forms in the sections you don't like, do not modify nouns. "who is wet" is a relative clause, not an adjective. "at work" is a prepositional phrase, not an adjective. It is very common in traditional grammar to say that these things are all "adjectival" in some sense (presumably just because they're all predicative) but to say so explains very little about their different distributions. In modern descriptive syntax, none of these things would be analysed as an adjective.

All of that is partly an issue of terminology. The point is that saying that participles are adjectives and gerunds are nouns doesn't explain their distribution. For example, adjectives can marginally undergo clefting: "It's dead you'll be if you stick your hand in the toaster", but present participles can't at all. Adjectives can be chained together ("a small, red book") but present participles can't ("* John is reading, smiling"). If you say that they're adjectives, you then have to say "but they don't behave like ordinary adjectives in the following 10 respects", rendering the claim terminologically possible but really rather vacuous.

The one thing that present participles and adjectives have in common is that they are both predicative (in contrast to gerunds, which aren't). This does mean that they behave in the same way in some respects. For example, neither can be the subject of a passive ("I kept quiet", "* Quiet was kept by me", "I kept reading", "* Reading was kept by me") and both can be used as secondary predicates ("John fell from the plane terrified", "John fell from the plane screaming"). But present participles have a peculiar distribution all of their own which is not even close to the distribution of adjectives overall. Cadr 04:42, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

I disagree with most of what you've written, and I'm starting to suspect that neither of us is going to convince each other of very much, so I think this discussion may have gone as far as it's going to go. :-/ Ruakh 05:53, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

Well, I'm sorry for that. I think the problem is that you're coming from the perspective of traditional grammar, which tends to be based on descriptively categorising different words, whereas I'm coming from the perspective of modern descriptive syntax, which is mostly concerned with predicting the distributions of words. So for me, it makes no sense to say that something is adjectival unless it actually patterns with adjectives. Cadr 09:44, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

Oh, it's not your fault; I'm just saying. And there's more to it than the difference in perspectives (though I'm sure that's part of it); I also disagree with some of your comments about the distributions of participles vs. ordinary adjectives. It's really not worth the continuing debate, though, as I'm not sure it really affects what the article should say. Ruakh 17:59, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] I stopped to smoke

"I stopped smoking" and "I stopped to smoke" are not structurally analogous in the way that "I like smoking" and "I like to smoke" are. The difference in meaning between the two "stop" sentences has nothing to do with differences between "to smoke" and "smoking". In "I stopped to smoke", "to smoke" is an adjunct, not the object of "stop". This is shown by the following facts (using "to read" instead of "to smoke", because "I stopped smoking to smoke" makes no sense, though it is grammatical):

• I stopped to read a book
• I stopped smoking
• I stopped smoking to read a book
• * I stopped to read a book smoking (cannot mean the same as the previous sentence)

"to read" does not need to be adjacent to the verb because it is not an object, whereas "smoking" is an object and consequentially does need to be adjacent to th verb. Now look at the following data:

• I like to smoke
• I like smoking
• I like smoking to start the morning
• * I like to start the morning smoking (grammatical but cannot mean the same as the previous sentence)
• I like to smoke to start the morning
• * I like to start the morning to smoke (ungrammatical and cannot mean the same as the previous sentence)

This shows that "to smoke" is the object of "like" in the first sentence, and "smoking" is the object of "like" in the second sentence. Thus, the difference between "I stopped smoking" and "I stopped to smoke" is simply that "smoking" is an object in the former, but "to smoke" is not an object in the latter.

Sorry this is a bit complicated; it's quite hard to actually show these things properly, but the data are very clear. Cadr 21:14, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Flawed example: "go on V-ing" vs. "go on to V"

The example given to contrast the uses of "go on" followed by a gerund or a to-infinitive

• After winning the semi-finals, he went on to the finals.

is clearly inapposite: "to the finals" is not an infinitive but a prepositional phrase. I suggest changing it to

• "After winning the semi-finals, he went on to win the finals as well." (He won the semi-finals, then later won the finals.) -- Dodiad

Yes, good call. I'll fix it. Ruakh 19:21, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Infinitives as Gerunds

Can't infinitives be gerunds? Do gerunds have to end in -ing, or are they just verbal nouns? For example, in "To rule is to destroy," "To rule" is the subject, and "to destroy" is the predicative nominal, both infinitives acting as nouns. "Ruling is destroying" means basically the same thing, and those are counted as gerunds. Can someone explain? Thanks. Lifeboat 20:22, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

In English, gerunds are specifically verbal nouns ending in -ing. You're correct that in many contexts, gerunds and infinitives are interchangeable; but the terms gerund and infinitive are not. Ruakh 20:55, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

Okay, thanks! Lifeboat 23:21, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Bit of self-reference in the intro

I'm just thinking the example phrase might be better off as a more generic example. Even though it's indirect, it still stands as a self-reference of sorts that might not make sense in printed form. Would anyone mind if we changed it to something else? Or have any suggestions as to what to change it? Or thinks I'm just being picky? :) Whatever that case, I know we're supposed to avoid self-reference on wikipedia, and it wouldn't hurt to change that I think. Errick 14:20, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

You're right that Wikipedia discourages self-references, but this one isn't explicit — the example would still make sense in any other context, it just wouldn't be a self-reference anymore. I really don't mind if you change it, but I really don't think it's a problem if it remains. Ruakh 14:34, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Question about prepositions and gerunds

I added a couple examples before coming and checking out the talk page, which was probably a little bit backwards. Regardless, does anyone know anything about prepositons that are followed by gerunds? (Particularly in the construction "verb someone into/out of verbing")

129.2.211.62 03:07, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Well, since gerunds function as nouns, pretty much any preposition can take a gerund as its object. "To foo someone into bar-ing" is generally to get him/her to bar by foo-ing at him/her: "he talked her into leaving" means "he talked to her and convinced her to leave"; "they conned him into giving them his money" means "they conned him, getting him to give them his money"; and so on. —Ruakh_TALK 05:01, 5 December 2006 (UTC)