dinition excluding

[Rover_KE]

I love this forum! I teach online at TutorABC and have so many questions sometimes. Maybe teaching online is not the same as face to face, but I love it because I get to stay home and make my own schedule:). Also the students are so respectful!

No further comment.

Rover

[5jj]

I remember reading an article on the differences between 'gerunds' and 'verbal nouns' [...] I think it was in one of Fowler's works. I will try to track it down.

Well, I found a few things in Fowler's Modern English Usage and The King's English, but nothing very helpful, and nothing at all on the adjective/adverb question.

Sidney Greenbaum tries to differentiate between:
- the gerund, a verbal noun: "They appreciate my visiting their parents regularly". Like a noun, it can be introduced by the genitive my, but like a verb it takes the direct object their parents.
- a noun derived from a verb: "They appreciate my visiting of their parents".
- a fused participle. "They appreciate the neighbours visiting their parents regularly". The -ing form is preced by a non-genitive form.

Though he describes the gerund as a verbal noun in one article, he contrasts verbal nouns with gerunds in another article, saying that the gerund is syntactically a verb.


Barb's need (and mine) for someone with more linguistics knowledge to explain this has not been helped by a former Quain professor of English language and literature and director of the Survey of English Usage. It appears to me that Greenbaum is trying to cover up with authoritative sounding words the fact that he doesn't know why we use this -ing form in different ways. This does not help us at all.


Greenbaum, Sidney in McArthur, Tom (ed), (1992), The Oxford Companion to the English Language, Oxford: OUP, pages 439 and 1085.

[freezeframe]

These are indeed extremely complicated matters not for mere mortals.

[Rover_KE]

Does anybody know what dinition excluding means?

Rover