A constructional approach to English verbal gerunds
نویسنده
چکیده
English verbal gerunds have long been of interest to syntacticians. Verbal gerund phrases display a mix of nominal and verbal properties which provide a challenge to any syntactic framework that assumes a strict version of X-bar theory. Various approaches have been proposed to get around these problems, but they all involve abandoning a fundamentally desirable theoretic assumption or adopting a highly abstract structure for which independent motivation is difficult to find, or both. An ideal analysis of verbal gerunds in English would be able to account for their mixed verbal and nominal properties without the addition of otherwise unmotivated mechanisms. In this paper, I will propose an analysis based on recent work in Construction Grammar and Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar that treats verbal gerunds as a hybrid category that inherits some properties of nouns and some properties of verbs.
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Gerundive Complements in English : A Constraint-Based Analysis
Much attention has been paid to English verbal gerunds in generative grammar, but most of the studies dealt with the abstract 'functional' category empty categories, derivational deep structure analyses, and things like that, which all ignored the Lexical Integrity Prniciple in the sense of Pollard and Sag (1994), Sag and Wasow (1999), Bresnan and Mchombo (1995), and Sells (1995). Only recently...
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