How do gerunds conceptualize events? A diachronic study

Abstract

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.

Categorial shift: from description to theory and back again

“…Tajima, 1985;Jack, 1988;Van der Wurff, 1993;Fanego 1996Fanego , 2004De Smet, 2007. Recent research, however, has focused on nominal gerunds, which, in a diachronic perspective, partly seem to shed their remaining 'verby' features (Fonteyn, Heyvaert & Maekelberghe, 2015;Fonteyn, 2016;Fonteyn & Hartmann, 2016;Fonteyn & Heyvaert, 2018). Interestingly, German cognate ung-structures, which can be considered far less heterogeneous in Present-day German compared to English -ing, used to have a broad variety of readings and usage variants as well (Demske, 2000(Demske, , 2002Hartmann, 2016).…”

Change in category membership from the perspective of construction grammar

“…Yet Fonteyn & Heyvaert's analysis shows that much of the sharpening of distinctions is down to the changing profile of the nominal gerunds. The authors observe that bare nominal gerunds typically "profile non-controlled generic events (Fonteyn, Heyvaert & Maekelberghe, 2015)". Thus while the new verbal gerunds fill a particular deictic niche in the system, the older bare nominal gerunds similarly are aligned with a particular discourse function.…”

Competing motivations in the diachronic nominalization of English gerunds

“…In an extensive corpus-based analysis, he teases out the functional motivations behind the well-studied rise of the verbalized gerund, stating that it can be explained as a diachronic process of substitution, as the verbal gerund gradually came to replace an older (and functionally less versatile) form. De Smet (2008, 2013 In particular, it seems that bare nominal gerunds that establish their referent through so-called "indirect clausal grounding" (for examples and explanation see Fonteyn [2016] and Langacker [2008]) were entirely replaced by verbal gerunds by the end of the Late Modern English period (Fonteyn, Heyvaert & Maekelberghe 2015 Given that the frequency of bare nominal gerunds continues to decrease in this period -while the frequency of nominal gerunds with indefinite article starts its substantial rise ( Figure 3) -it is tempting to assume that the rise of nominal gerunds with an indefinite article is related to the further demise of bare nominal gerunds. In order to test this hypothesis, we conducted a referential analysis of all 732 indefinite nominal gerunds and 466 bare nominal gerunds occurring between 1710-1920 in CLMET3.1.…”