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This article offers a cognitive perspective on the evolution of the semantics of English nominal gerunds (NG) (I regret the signing of the contract) and verbal gerunds (VG) (I regret signing the contract). While the formal differences between NGs and VGs are well documented, their semantics remains largely unexplored territory. The perspective that is taken here is centered on the linguistic notion of reference and various aspects of the conceptualization involved in it. As they formally hover between more nominal and more clauselike internal properties, gerunds form an interesting test case for the cognitive perspective on referentiality. Our corpus analysis describes how the situations that NGs and VGs refer to are conceptualized as deictic expressions grounded in the speech event in Present-day English, and how this has changed since the Early Modern period. It is shown that only a multi-layered model of referentiality can account for the subtle differences found between NGs and VGs: while no fundamental shifts are found with regard to the traditional referential subtypes (specific, non-specific, generic), NGs and VGs do turn out to differ in their choice for either nominal or clausal grounding mechanisms, in their status as existentially stable or flexible entities and in the mental spaces in which they situate the events that they conceptualize.

While earlier descriptions of the English present participle have tended to be too general or too exclusively focused on its progressive meaning, this article aims to present an account of the meanings of the English present participle that captures their full richness. It starts from the observation that many (though not all) present participle clauses/phrases are paradigmatically related to adjectival phrases, as manifested in their distributional properties (e.g. a challenging year, those living alone). The article analyses the semantic effects that arise from the tension between the verbal semantics of the participial stem and the adjectival semantics of the syntactic slot. These effects involve accommodation of the verbal situation to the requirement that a situation is represented as time-stable and as simultaneous to some contextually given reference time. The progressive meaning is one such semantic effect, but participles may also assume iterative, habitual or gnomic readings. Some construction-specific semantic extensions of this adjectival template are identified and a tentative explanation is offered for them. Those constructions where the present participle has lost its semantic association with adjective phrases, such as the progressive construction and integrated participle clauses, are shown to display loosening or specialization of semantic constraints.

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