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Project

The use of nominal and verbal gerunds in Present-day English. A multifunctional comparative analysis.

This project wants to shed light on the Present-day English (PDE) use of nominal and verbal gerunds. Nominal gerunds (1) have the internal syntax of a noun phrase, verbal gerunds (2) that of a clause. (1) Is [achieving of the minimum wall thickness] () sufficient to meet fitting design requirements? (COCA) (2) I remembered [him using the word malfunction] (BNC). Gerunds (esp. verbal gerunds) have received a fair amount of attention in the literature. Existing analyses, however, fail to clarify what it is exactly that distinguishes PDE nominal from verbal gerunds and why in specific structural and discursive contexts the language user prefers one over the other (in the (a) examples, for instance, the alternative gerund type is possible too). This project aims to trace the functional properties of gerunds that underlie the PDE language users choice for either a verbal or a nominal gerund, along a number of axes (e.g. structural, aspectual, referential), through a comparative corpus-based analysis.
Date:1 Oct 2013 →  30 Sep 2017
Keywords:gerunds, Present-day English, corpus analysis
Disciplines:Theory and methodology of literary studies