@Joe Nation,
Quote:Give us an example using "shitting" as a gerund, please.
That would be the helpful, useful and informative response rather than the purely negative one you offered.
Joe(pretty please with sugar on top)Nation
You're too sensitive, Joe. I gave one. It was in keeping with the theme of the thread.
Shitting people is not a good idea.
Here's some really helpful information, though, it is, I must admit, slightly off topic. But helpful librarian that he is, I don't think HingeHead will be too piqued at this.
Quote:Gerunds vs. participles
September 19, 2010 @ 8:14 am Β· Filed by Mark Liberman under Syntax
In some comments on yesterday's "Possessive with gerund" post, the traditional distinction between gerunds and present participles was assumed. Because all English "gerunds" and all English "present participles" have exactly the same form, namely VERB+ing, and because the space of constructions where these forms appear is large and not obviously subject to binary division, my few attempts as a schoolboy to distinguish the two in English were mostly random guesses. I always suspected that the teacher's answer key had no better foundation.
Therefore I was happy when Geoffrey Pullum and Rodney Huddleston, in the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, presented a clear and compelling argument that "A distinction between gerund and present participle can't be sustained" (pp. 80-83 and 1220-1222). They therefore use the merged category "gerund-participle". I hope that most of you will be as happy about this development as I was.
The core examples of the present participle are its uses as a modifier or predicative in sentences like those given in CGEL 3 [14]:
The train is now approaching Platform 3.
The train approaching Platform 3 is the 11.20 to Bath.
He threw it in the path of an approaching train.
The core examples of the gerund are its uses as the verbal head of a noun-like construction in sentences like those in CGEL 3 [19]:
Destroying the files was a serious mistake.
I regret destroying the files.
CGEL:
Historically the gerund and present participle of traditional grammar have different sources, but in Modern English, the forms are identical. No verb shows any difference in form in the constructions of [14] and [19], not even be. The historical difference is of no relevance to the analysis of the current inflectional system [β¦] This grammar also takes the view that even from the point of view of syntax (as opposed to inflection) the distinction between gerund and present participle is not viable, and we will therefore also not talk of gerund and present participle constructions [β¦]
I'll sketch CGEL's grammatical arguments in a later post β or perhaps Geoff Pullum will step in. But for now, I thought I'd just put the idea on the table, for the sake of everyone who was as baffled by gerundology as I was.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2639
