English provides several distinct mechanisms by which verbs may be nominalized, as illustrated in (1-2). The form electing in (1a) is sometimes termed the “verbal” gerund, while the perfectly homophonous form in (1b) is termed the “nominal” gerund. Nominal gerunds in English are distinguished from verbal gerunds syntactically, by their inability to assign objective case to an object (hence the ...

It is often assumed that there is a small number of primitive, universal, and perhaps innate syntactic categories. Mixed category constructions involve lexical items that seem to be central members of more that one part of speech and so pose a problem for the standard view of syntactic categories. For example, the verbal gerund phrase in Chris worried about Pat’s frequently eating hamburgers ha...

This paper shows that the Gerund Phrase (GP) in the Spanish Gerund Construction (e.g., El jefe entró a su oficina corriendo, lit. ‘The boss entered his office running’) is sometimes a complement (in SGCC) and sometimes an adjunct (in SGCA). Although in both cases, the GP expresses a non-argument of the main lexical verb's denotation, it is a syntactic adjunct in SGCA and a syntactic dependent o...

This paper shows that the Gerund Phrase (GP) in the Spanish Gerund Construction (e.g., El jefe entró a su oficina corriendo, lit. ‘The boss entered his office running’) is sometimes a complement (in SGCC) and sometimes an adjunct (in SGCA). Although in both cases, the GP expresses a non-argument of the main lexical verb's denotation, it is a syntactic adjunct in SGCA and a syntactic dependent o...

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...

The earliest generative work derived all nominalizations syntactically (Chomsky 1955-6, Lees 1960). Chomsky (1970) then argued that only -ing gerunds are derived syntactically, while all other types of event nominals, such as refutation, acceptance, refusal, are derived morphologically in the lexicon from bases that are unspecified between nouns and verbs. The suffix -ing was shown to serve bot...