Development of the Gerund

Development of the Gerund

The gerund is a non-finite form of the verb. The other non-finite verb forms are the infinitive and the participle. This verb names an action, state or functions of some subject or maybe he is used as a noun. They are so easy to observe, they are formed from verbs by adding ING: go – going; speak – speaking, work – working.

According to the history of the development of English Present Participle and the verbal noun were identical: the both ended in –ing, but they had different using.  This fact contributed to the confusion of some of their features. This feature is called direct object- as well as the frequent absence of article before –ing -form which has a function as a noun, in our days it’s transformed the verbal noun into a Gerund. So functions which were of inflected infinitive were taken over by the Gerund. We can see these first examples of these changes in the 12th c.

History of formation of the Gerund

Gerund it’s a common term in traditional Latin grammar which has a meaning of verbal noun of action, it’s something between the name and the verb. Gerund in Latin has a suffix -nd-; gerund doesn’t have a nominative form (traditional Latin grammar demonstrates that the nominative form of gerund it’s usually the infinitive of the verb). In other cases gerunds can be used as an ordinary noun (words neuter genus in traditional declination 2). It may be used without or with preposition, for example modus vive-nd-i 'lifestyle [genitive]', ad lege-nd-um 'for read [accusative] ', hominis mens disce-nd-o alitur (Cicero)' the human mind feeds on doctrine [ablative] ', etc.

The most important and remarkable feature of the Latin Gerund is that he is having morphological properties of the name and it retains too the syntactic properties of the verb. For example: “ The proposal Themistocles maritimos praedones consectando mare tutum redditit (Nepos) – “Фемистокл, преследуя морских разбойников, сделал море безопасным” Here is used the Gerund “consectando” from the verb consectari ' преследовать ' it used in ablative form (corresponds to the functions circumstances of manner), but apart from this function it also manages the accusative noun in phrase “maritimos praedones” ' морских разбойников ' (in Latin are the verbs who controlled accusative form, and the "real" verbal names controlled genitive forms of dependent object name). Gerund may also like the verb to have adverb used as definitions.

Outside of Latin grammar, the term "gerund" is almost never used; it may be mentioned in the use of English grammatical tradition, where the term "gerund" denotes verbal nouns with suffix indicator -ing (such as reading 'reading', arriving 'arrival', etc.). Use of the term "gerund" in this case is quite motivated, since English names in -ing also retain elements of verbal government source additions and circumstances.