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OK, folks, as new kid on the block I'd like to throw in a question that's been bugging me for ages, to whit, what is the real difference between a gerund and a present participle. I know what the books say - a gerund is a verb used as a noun, and a present participle is a verb used as an adjective.

That doesn't satisfy me because, for example, when we talk about the unemployed, "unemployed" is an adjective, as far as I'm aware. It doesn't suddenly become a noun because we are using it as one - we can use an old shoe as an ashtray, but that doesn't mean it is an ashtray...

If I say "I am walking", according to standard analyses 'walking' is a present participle, which would make the utterance similar to "I am cold" or, perhaps more appropriately, "I am stupid". On the other hand, if 'walking' is a gerund, the utterance is similar to "I am happiness" or "I am a tree".

And then again, if 'walking' is a present participle, ie an adjective, does that mean that what we traditionally call the Present Continuous tense (or tense/aspect combination) is purely a descriptive statement along the lines of the aforementioned "I am cold"? That would suggest that it's not actually a tense (or tense/aspect combination) at all.

Unless "I am cold" is an example of the recently discovered Present Frozen tense.

Well, szwagier, heaven knows I am no expert (even if, unfortunately, I sometimes act like one ), and I hesitate to venture into these waters, since they are treacherous indeed. But I am intrigued by your beautifully written post here, and cannot help myself.

Unlike you, I think if I use an old shoe as an ashtray, then it is an ashtray, at least during the time that I'm using it thus. And for me, when I say, "The unemployed...", then unemployed, here, is a noun, regardless of the fact that the same word is often employed as an adjective. What may be the sticking point in this discussion, is our definition of what a definition is. Is a screwdriver always a screwdriver, or only when we use it to drive screws? Does it "become" something else if we use it to murder someone? The cops (in America, at least) would refer to it somewhat generically as "the murder weapon", I suppose. As for me, I have no trouble with changing labels for different uses of tools. And also for me, words (along with other parsings of English) are tools.

When I look at this, I say, "Where's the problem?" But then I've been around long enough and seen enough from you in your posts here to realize that I may not be seeing what's right there in front of my eyes. So, in spite of your highly entertaining post that began this thread, can I be a pain and ask you to elaborate further?

Larry Latham

Thanks for the kind words, again

A little bit of introduction - Michael Lewis' The English Verb was one of the first books I read when I started on my EFL career many moons ago, and his ability to look behind the terminology in order to discover a deeper simplicity impressed me greatly. I realised, once I started thinking this way, that it was worth trying to take his approach further and see if we could remove some more obfuscation.

The problem is twofold, as I see it:

1. It's of little help, to learners or teachers, or linguists, to call one thing by two different names depending on what it seems to be doing in one particular context. Giving an -ing form two names depending on its position in an utterance naturally leads people to assume that it is two things - in this context that a present participle is not a gerund, and vice versa. I'm wondering whether this natural assumption, brought about purely on the basis of terminology, is valid. The other possibility is that gerunds and present participles, like boots and ashtrays, are the same thing appearing in different contexts.

From what I can vaguely recall of my Chomskyan syntax at university, nouns and adjectives are relatively closely connected in a way that, for example, nouns and verbs are not. This isn't the right moment to get into a debate on the rights and wrongs of Chomskyan linguistics on the grand scale, but it does seem intuitively right to me that nouns and adjectives are close relatives. The 'unemployed' example shows this.

So the basic point here is - are 'present participle' and 'gerund' 2 names for different things, or 2 names for one thing. I think that's important because if the latter option is true there is a generalisation that we're missing, and that leads me on to the second point.

2. If we can say both -ing forms are actually the same semantic/syntactic thing, where does that leave the Continuous Aspect? It's generally taught as a 'tense', but if we can parse a sentence like "I am walking" in the same way as "I am cold" then "am walking" is no more a 'tense' than "am cold" is, and we can safely forget all about presenting it as one of the forms of the English verb, thus reducing the number of problems that arise when learners have this multiplicity of verb forms to choose from.

The other reason I lie awake at night thinking about this is that I'm more of a theoretical linguist at heart than a teacher and I want to know how the language works. The current 'explanations' don't cut it for me - they're too ad hoc, and if there's one lesson we can learn from the 'hard' sciences, it's that ad hoc explanations almost always mean we're not looking hard enough, or in the right way, at a problem.

Hope I've made the question a little clearer, although I realise I'm no closer to a solution...

Szwagier, you and I seem to be cut from similar, if not the same cloth. I can see that you tend to look at things in much the same way that I do, although we seem to have reached different (tentative) conclusions in this particular case. I couldn't agree with you more about ad hoc 'explanations' and how often they seem to send us off in the wrong direction.

But...I'm going to disagree with your first point. My feeling is that it is extraordinarily helpful to attach two different names to a single form, depending on what it is doing at the time it is used. The two different names implies that, despite appearances, one use is not the same as another use even if the form looks the same.

Take, for example (just to use something different than your pres. part. vs gerund example for the moment, although the principle is the same, I believe) a look at some common verb forms. I prefer to teach my students (but if someone can show me where I'm wrong, I'll be glad to listen) that every verb in English has five different forms:

a basic form: jump

a present simple form: jump/jumps (the -s being an arbitrarily imposed anomaly probably caused by a historical feature of English which is no longer necessary....but there it is, and we use it)

a past simple form: jumped

a past participle form: jumped

and a present participle form: jumping

Now, notice that the past simple form (for this particular verb, chosen because it illustrates my point) and the past participle form look like the same word. I take pains, in my classes, to point out that though they may look the same, they are indeed different, because they are not ever used in the same way. For instance, the past simple "jumped" is always used alone, without an auxiliary. We cannot say, * "She can jumped over the fence." or * "I am jumped when the boss said 'jump'." However, the other jumped, the past participle one, is always used with an auxiliary, and therefore has a slightly different component meaning. We do say, "I have jumped over that wall many times." But the jumped in this sentence is not the same jumped as appears in the two previous example sentences. And, by a similar kind of reasoning, the jump in the basic form is not the same jump as the one in present simple form...they are not used in the same way.

So I would say, given an -ing form, one could not say whether it was a present participle or a gerund on the basis of that alone. One would have to observe it in use in order to make the distinction. I would not say that it is a matter context, however, except in the sense of syntactic context.

I did not really understand what you meant by 'nouns and adjectives are connected in a way that nouns and verbs are not'. Could you elaborate on that one a bit more, please.

So the basic point, here, it seems to me, is that 'present participle' and 'gerund' are two names for two different things, despite their appearance of being the same.

If that is acceptable to you, then your point #2 disappears, I think. We cannot, it seems to me, parse "I am walking." in the same way as we do, "I am cold." Or, at least, I would not. To me, the first example is a subject and a verb...period. The second is a subject, a copula verb, and a predicate adjective.

Now, I suspect that you may take issue with me. Good. Maybe I can learn something. Maybe some other gentle readers can too!

Larry Latham

I agree with both of you in part. Words have function and we label them accordingly. The best example, is the simplest, "a". Webster has 231 entries for this word, you find it everywhere, but you can't define it until it is used within some context. Only then can you see its function.

I like szwagier's idea that that present participles are nothing more than adjectives. Dutch is a language I studied for a while; It struck me that it contained many intermediary language stages, between German and English. The version in Friesland, Frisian, is supposed to have lots of similarities to English. In Dutch -ing words are nouns, not verbs - it's not hard to see the connection to adjectives. Plus, I believe, we inherited things like "Ik will" from them. I means "I want" - it's not difficult to imagine people say I will rest (I want to rest), I will sleep (I want to sleep). My favourite migration from German is "Steh still" Stehen = stand, and still = quiet. We (almost) pronounce the same but write it as "Stay still", with almost the exact same meaning.

As far as I'm aware, no other European language has a continuous tense like English, so I imagine that it evolved in the England when English was going through one of its pidgin phases.

Lastly, to my mind, what we refer to as grammar is merely our current preception of how language works. There are different types of grammar:

• Systemic functional grammar
  Word grammar
  Functional grammar
  Transformational-generative grammar
  Role and reference grammar
  Phrase structure rules
  Government and Binding
  Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG)
  Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG)

Perception is another subject, yet again.
Iain

Ahh...so! I will pretend that I understand what you said, Iain, but your knowledge of European languages is so vastly superior to mine, that I'm afraid in reality, I don't.

Larry Latham

In reality my knowledge of foreign languages is pretty sketchy, but I did notice a couple of things along the way

Iain

Who was it who said something about the ability to notice being the important thing? I have a vague feeling it was either Einstein or Sherlock Holmes, but either way Long Live the Noticers

Are all those different grammars still alive and kicking? I recognise some of them from my undergrad days (too much time spent in the library rather than attending lectures), but I thought most of them were dead or in critical condition... Incidentally, I think EFL/ESL pedagogical grammar is a different beast from all of these, and still going strong despite Mr Lewis' attempts to drive a stake through its heart.

Last night I went offline in somewhat whimsical mood thinking about Larry's comment on the subject of screwdrivers and murder weapons. If someone is dropped off a bridge, Godfather-style, wearing concrete shoes - is the river the murder weapon? How is it admitted into evidence in court? Will a bucket of water from the river do? Does it have to be the very same water that the deceased inhaled?

To return, crab style, to the topic, I remembered why I started puzzling about this all those years ago. Somewhere, and more than once, Lewis wrote about forgetting passives as a separate grammatical structure and simply teaching them as adjectives. And I thought "why stop at passives?"

If you can redefine past participles as adjectives, why not present? And that, after a decade's pondering, led directly to this thread.

Larry, my comment about nouns and adjectives being similar had to do with the way words, or rather different meanings of words, were stored in the lexicon in Government and Binding theory (perhaps dduck can help me out here). I only recall it vaguely, but I do remember that nouns and adjectives somehow "went together", as did (I think) verbs and prepositions. It sounds like complete gobbledygook (Dutch word, apparently ) now, as I write it, but it seemed to make some sort of sense at the time.

Your point about regular past tenses and past participles is irrefutable. And yet... and yet. Are there any historical (not hysterical) linguists out there? We have irregular as well as regular past participles. Do we have any irregular -ing forms? I'm not being facetious here - it's a serious question. When did -ing forms arrive in English, or were they always there?

Following dduck's lead in comparative syntax, the only other language I would claim to know in any detail is Polish, and the Polish ~equivalents of gerunds and present participles, interestingly enough, are also very similar to each other - with the important difference that the "present participle" has an adjectival suffix stuck on it (Polish has enough morphology to make Classics scholars weep with joy). And even more interestingly, neither form can be used as a noun.

Gerunds are usually contrasted with infinitives in EFL textbooks ("It started to rain" v "It started raining"), and the "rules" say that the two forms are interchangeable except when they're not. (Great rule - I've always enjoyed "explaining" that to classes). So are these -ing forms a different kind of infinitive, then? "I am thinking"/"I am to think" - it works with pres. part. v infinitive, too! It still doesn't cover everything, though - "a thinking person"/"a to think person".

No, this is hopeless... I'm going to go/to go going round in circles so fast I'll fall over in a minute. Less analysis, more perception....

One of the interesting things about this particular discussion is that no one but the three of us has been crazy enough to get into it. One of the great things about this particular discussion is that everyone in it is crazy. One of the things about this particular discussion that I like a lot is that all of us are willing to stick our necks out with some pretty off-the-wall stuff. I can't help but think about the fact that the people in it (so far, anyway) are spread from different parts of Europe to California, and how nice it might be if we were having it in a cozy room with a big fireplace, a roaring blaze, and a snifter of something aromatic after a full dinner. Heck, I might even be tempted to light up a cigar under those circumstances! (And I don't smoke.)

Hear, hear about the ability to notice. I often imagine that if we could only train our students to do this, our jobs would be much easier and a whole lot more interesting. And, by the way, it was our mutual friend, Michael Lewis, who had quite a lot to say about this.

Some of Iain's "grammars" I have never heard of. Take the Government and Binding Grammar, for instance. What the devil is that? At any rate, szwagier, I'm still in the dark about the nouns and adjectives that "go together", except of course that they "work together" in English syntax. But nevermind. This brandy has me too mellow to much care.

You said:

We have irregular as well as regular past participles. Do we have any irregular -ing forms? I'm not being facetious here - it's a serious question. When did -ing forms arrive in English, or were they always there?

We do indeed have irregular forms in past participles. Regular or irregular, if the form is the same as a simple past as it is as a past participle, my argument remains that they are different words. I assume it's a moot point if the past simple form is different from the past participle (as, for example, in (be)), since I wouldn't think there'd be any confusion.

I am not aware that there are any "irregular" -ing forms. I tell my students that present participles are always made by affixing -ing to the base form. I hope if there are any exceptions to that, someone reading all this will post a correction to enhance my education. As to when the -ing forms arrived in English, I haven't the faintest idea.

Your remarks about the Polish language having adjectival suffixes, and loads of morphology in general, made me think about a book I have recently read. It's called The Atoms of Language, and it's written by Mark C. Baker, who is Professor of Linguistics, specializing in typologies, at the Center for Cognitive Science at Rutgers University in the U.S.A. It is a discussion of linguistic parameters, and among the more interesting points in his book are his notions about polysynthetic languages. Polysynthetic languages, if I have understood Baker properly, use affixes (in this case often on verbs) to indicate the particular roles of the main participants (subject, object, indirect object) in the event described by the sentence. The result is that the nouns can come in just about any order, or even (context permitting) be left out altogether because the verb with it's prefixes and suffixes pretty much tells the whole story. Mohawk (an American Indian language) is such a language, but there are many others. Anyway, the book is worth a read, if you have an interest in such things.

Whew! Maybe the cigar smoke is getting to me. I gotta go for now.

Larry Latham

Government and Binding is one of Chomsky's theories he published in the 80s. However, that became outdated in the early 90s when Chomsky started on his new theory: The Minimalist Program (Of which I know absolutely nothing). So, szwagier is quite correct about the some of the grammars being past their sell-by-date. My point, if I remember, is that there are many ways to conceptionalize grammar. Every once in a while, someone comes along and redefines how we should think about grammar (e.g. Ferdinand de Saussure, Chomsky, etc.). So, in some small, being somewhat of an anarchist myself, I enjoy pulling language apart (or throwing away our language assumptions) and looking for a better way.

Regarding, the "ing" form, the evolution began in Old English. Originally, the present participle ending was "ende", but the ending "inge" began to be used. Apparently, it came about because scribes at the time were confused between the spoken and written verb forms. It should be noted that usage of the present participle wasn't common. In the period we now know as Middle English, around 1500 A.D, the suffix changed to "ing" which was consistant with the gerund form at that time, and it's usage became widespread.

Iain

Thanks, Iain. You and szwagier are pretty impressive in your individual and collective knowledge of our field here. Nice to talk with both of you.

Larry Latham

I've enjoyed our conversations immensely. I've been trying to use fancy lingo, not to make myself sound grand (I still have much to learn), rather I'd like to learn more about these subjects and the more you talk about something the more it becomes part of the ol' grey matter. As you said, Larry, we've been pushing the envelope. Keep those neurons firing, firing, firing!

Iain

Amen, Iain. However much we can manage to learn, it never seems like enough. There's always so very much more.

Larry Latham
[edit] And there always seem to be plenty of people who know more than I do.

The problem with saying "he's singing" is the same as "he's cold" is that you will have transitive and intransitive adjectives. A mess.

As far as I'm aware, no other European language has a continuous tense like English,

If you take the ear muffs off (even though it is cold) you will find that you will be hearing continous tenses every now and again, presuming there are still some Spanish in Madrid.