{"id":392857,"date":"2010-03-05T11:29:53","date_gmt":"2010-03-05T16:29:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2161"},"modified":"2010-03-05T11:29:53","modified_gmt":"2010-03-05T16:29:53","slug":"not-a-gerund-not-a-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/392857","title":{"rendered":"Not a gerund, not a thing"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have seen repellently bad poetry on various subjects (mortgage services<\/a> and sewage disposal<\/a>, to name but two); but my horror at the poem publicized by National Grammar Day<\/a> was not evoked solely by the poetic standard, low though it is:<\/p>\n

\n

I love the King of Ing
\nHe makes me want to sing
\nAdd him to an action word
\nAnd it’s a gerund… now a thing!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Nor was it that the poet, Nancy Wright, won a prize for it. What makes me shudder is that it does that noun\/thing confusion again (the one that underlies Jon Stewart’s terror<\/em> error<\/a>). Even under the traditional (but incorrect) notion that if you add -ing<\/em> to a verb stem you get a “gerund” or verbal noun, it is not claimed that you get a thing<\/strong>. What is claimed is that you get a word of the syntactic category Noun, the category that includes (among other words) all of our most basic one-word ways of making reference to things. National Grammar Day is celebrating, rather than condemning, one of the worst and most elementary popular confusions about grammar.
\n<\/span>
\nIncidentally, the reason it’s a bad idea to use the Latin term “gerund” for words like talking<\/em>, and a mistake to think that they are nouns, is that the form in question (The Cambridge Grammar<\/em><\/a> calls it a gerund-participle<\/strong>) functions in several different ways:<\/p>\n