Gerund-participle

Near-synonyms: (in other operational definitions) gerund, present participle

The gerund-participle ¶ Traditionally (for example, in the grammar of Latin), a gerund is a verb-form that is functionally similar to a noun, whereas a participle is one that is functionally similar to an adjective.

THE TERM 'GERUND-PARTICIPLE' used in the title of this paper is adopted from Huddleston and Pullum (2002:80), who see no reason to give priority to one or the other of the traditional terms used to refer to the verbal uses of the English -ing form illustrated in (1):

The intralinguistic analysis carried out on our sample has revealed that, on average, the English gerund-participle is frequently used to realize circumstance adverbials, which may express a great variety of semantic roles.

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".

This amounted to 176 occurrences of the gerund-participle and 49 of the to-infinitive, an interesting statistic in itself, as it confirms the more noun-like character of the gerund-participle, ...