Definitions
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun Plural form of
gerund .
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
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Examples
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Yeah, yeah, she said, it’s appearing in a finite verb form all right, but the thing is, in English gerunds and progressive participles sound the same!
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To shift the discussion just a bit, whether or not we say present participles and gerunds should be differentiated as distinct parts of speech, it still seems to me that except for in cases of a present participle in the slot of attributive adjective (ex/The steering wheel of my car is blue) gerunds and present participles take objects (I like driving my car).
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As Swan (2005) notes: “The distinction between ‘participles’ and ‘gerunds’ is not always clear-cut, and it can sometimes be difficut to decide which term to use” (p. 270).
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The racist one who lives next to The National Insurance and Guarantee Corporation Limited – a subsidiary of UK financial services company Royal Bank of Scotland Group and the gerunds …
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Although many verbs can be followed by a gerund, only a few verbs are very common with gerunds.
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Consider these examples (from the British National Corpus) and you tell me which are gerunds and which are participles:
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As Swan (2005) notes: “The distinction between ‘participles’ and ‘gerunds’ is not always clear-cut, and it can sometimes be difficut to decide which term to use” (p. 270).
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He mentions that gerunds carry the meaning of ‘real, present, in progress’ while infinitives carry the meaning of ‘potential, unreal, future’.
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Consider these examples (from the British National Corpus) and you tell me which are gerunds and which are participles:
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Also like David, I think the ability of gerunds & infinitives to take objects is probably more important than distinctions between the too.
Comments
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