number4940
New member
- Joined
- Apr 28, 2010
- Member Type
- Other
(I'm not a teacher.)
A friend posted a sentence that goes like this:
"She is puzzling."
and meant by that, that she was doing a puzzle. (It was meant to be a pun.) She said that she meant "puzzling" in the sense of a gerund, which she said so that it would not come across as that she meant that she was confusing.
I thought that it could not be a gerund.
I figured that puzzling in that case would be a participle. Usually I wouldn't debate over something like this, but she teaches English.
Can anyone confirm one way or the other what part of speech "puzzling" represents here?
A friend posted a sentence that goes like this:
"She is puzzling."
and meant by that, that she was doing a puzzle. (It was meant to be a pun.) She said that she meant "puzzling" in the sense of a gerund, which she said so that it would not come across as that she meant that she was confusing.
I thought that it could not be a gerund.
I figured that puzzling in that case would be a participle. Usually I wouldn't debate over something like this, but she teaches English.
Can anyone confirm one way or the other what part of speech "puzzling" represents here?