The gerund in middle English

Donner, Morton

doi:10.1080/00138388608598465

Cited by 18 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…By Late Middle English, direct objects were still rare: their proportion with respect to of-phrases was then less than 10 per cent (cf. Donner 1986). In the period 1570-1640 it had risen to 75 per cent and by 1700 it reached 95 per cent (see Fanego 1996b: 128 As can be observed in these quotations, the extension of direct objects and other verbal features to Type II gerunds gave rise to the emergence of constructions with a mixture of nominal and verbal properties; some of these (e.g.…”

Section: English Verbal Gerunds: 4 Origins and Developmentmentioning

confidence: 94%

Some strategies for coding sentential subjects in English

Fanego

2004

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This study examines two types of -ing subjects in English: the Late Modern English pattern the deceiving him was easy and constructions such as by trying to make her mother happy proved unlucky for Paul, which are becoming frequent among American undergraduates. It is argued that the presence of the and by in both structures is prompted by the desire to provide explicit grammatical marking for clauses that, because of their role as pre-verbal subjects, are cognitively very complex. The paper discusses the ongoing grammaticalization of by Xing sequences and outlines the historical developments leading to the emergence of the pattern with an introductory the, for which it proposes an analysis in terms of Lass's (1990Lass's ( , 1997 concept of exaptation.

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Section: English Verbal Gerunds: 4 Origins and Developmentmentioning

confidence: 94%

Some strategies for coding sentential subjects in English

Fanego

2004

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“…their respective positions on Ross's nouniness squish, see Section 3.2.2; De Smet 2008: 56;Lees 1966;Langacker 1991;Heyvaert 2003Heyvaert , 2004. Donner 1986;Jack 1988;Houston 1989;Van der Wurff 1993;Fanego 1996Fanego , 1998Fanego , 2004Miller 2002;Kranich 2006Kranich , 2007Zehentner 2014), leaving us with a relatively clear picture of the gradual reconfiguration of noun phrase structure into non-finite clause structure. In Old English, the derivational mechanism -ing(g)(e) or -ung(g)(e) created abstract nouns from verbal stems.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Competing motivations in the diachronic nominalization of English gerunds

Fonteyn

Maekelberghe

2018

DIA

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The present study is an in-depth, corpus-based analysis of the rise and institutionalization of the indefinite nominal gerund in Late Modern English, considering the observed developments in light of their interactions with functionally related constructions. Based on historical data taken from the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (version 3.1), we argue that the rise of indefinite nominal gerunds constitutes an instance of diachronic nominalization, in which the nominal gerund over time gradually comes to exploit a fuller range of paradigmatic properties associated with the nominal class. At the same time, this study investigates the potential influence of isomorphism on the observed developments. While the results do support the frequently investigated claim that language systems have a (weak) preference for a one-form-one-meaning organization in later stages of their development, the initial emergence of indefinite nominal gerunds can more accurately be explained by allowing system pressure as an enabling force of linguistic innovation. The picture presented in this study serves as evidence that the long-term development of linguistic constructions can be the result of competing – even maximally opposite – forces.

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“…2 Verbalization (and nominalization for that matter) in this diachronic sense is to be understood as a historical process in which a form gradually acquires verb-like (or, with nominalization, noun-like) characteristics, often combined with the loss of features of its original category (Malchukov 2004:119). The diachronic verbalization of the gerund has thus far mainly been defined in morphosyntactic terms, as earlier studies focused on the lengthy process involving the reconfiguration of the NP structure of the nominal gerund into that of a nonfinite clause (Jespersen 1940;Mustanoja 1960;Visser 1963Visser -1973Emonds 1973;Tajima 1985Tajima , 1996Tajima , 1999Donner 1986;Jack 1988;Houston 1989; Van der Wurff 1993;Fanego 1996aFanego , 1996bFanego , 1998Fanego , 2004Miller 2002;Kranich 2006). In that process, the gerund gradually acquired verbal properties, such as the ability to: a.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What It Means to Verbalize

Fonteyn

Smet

Heyvaert

2015

Journal of English Linguistics

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The English gerund system consists of two types of gerunds: a nominal gerund (the learning of a language), and a verbal gerund that developed out of the nominal gerund (learning a language). While the formal aspects of this diachronic verbalization of the gerund are well documented, much remains to be said about the discoursefunctional side of the change. In this paper, it is argued that the formal verbalization of the gerund is accompanied by an important change in the discourse-functional organization of the gerund system. Based on functional characterizations of noun phrase (NP) behavior in the literature, the prototypical behavior of complex NPs is operationalized as (i) functioning as manipulable discourse participants that are important enough in the following discourse to be susceptible to anaphoric targeting and (ii) being inaccessible to anaphoric targeting of internal participants. The results of an analysis of a set of nominal gerunds, verbal gerunds and 'regular' complex NPs covering the period 1640-1914 (taken from the Penn Parsed Corpora of Early Modern and Modern British English) shows that the increasingly clause-like appearance of the verbal gerund is in fact accompanied by atypical NP behavior. Moreover, the paper makes clear that the changes in the discourse-functional organization of the gerund system did not only affect the verbal gerund, but also had some implications for the nominal gerund. These findings shed new light on the (diachronic) processes of verbalization and nominalization, and on what they mean on a discourse-functional level.

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The gerund in middle English

Cited by 18 publications

References 2 publications

Some strategies for coding sentential subjects in English

Some strategies for coding sentential subjects in English

Competing motivations in the diachronic nominalization of English gerunds

What It Means to Verbalize

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