Talk:Gerund

Drinking problem much

I don't believe in gerunds - I think this concept is a confusion between form (verb) and function (subject, object etc). However, after reading what's here, perhaps you ought to clarify the following. You have the following discussion:

"In an episode of Dan Vs., "The Ninja", after Dan's milk carton exploded from the ninja's shuriken, a teenager said to Dan "Drinking problem much?" and Dan complained that the sentence had no verb, just a gerund.[citation needed]"

Surely "drinking" here is a present participle being used "adjectivally" (whatever that means). In any event, "problem" is not the object to "drinking", so I don't think it can be a gerund. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.250.86.130 (talk) 06:12, 22 May 2014 (UTC)

This is in fact a gerund, the "drinking" is a verbal noun and here as a noun adjunct modifying "problem", essentially "problem of drinking". If it's an adjectival use of a participle, it would imply that the problem "drinks" - a "drinking" problem - which is illogical. 116.49.71.177 (talk) 20:08, 4 August 2024 (UTC)

Prepositional complement

Dear Sir, I appreciate your efforts in this article. Most probably I agree to what you have said but one point I object here. Both prepositional object and prepositional complement are the same. The traditional grammar has used the term " prepositional obkect" whereas the modern grammar has used the term " prepositional complement ". Birbal Kumawat (talk) 17:22, 19 July 2019 (UTC)

MOS edits

Which ones are a problem please? Primergrey (talk) 02:55, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

Well, to take just one example, much of the bold type greatly improves the readability of the article, focusing attention on the essential units. It must be remembered that not all of us have young eyes. Just try separating all caps from initial caps from bold type, etc., as much as possible. That will allow specific foci, rendering further editing much easier. Antinoos69 (talk) 10:08, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

That you don't know that WP does not bold for emphasis tells me that maybe you should keep away from the undo button when you see edits that do not affect the content in any way. Primergrey (talk) 22:44, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

my edits

I would like to know the problem with any of the following:

• eliminating over-capitalisation per MOS:CAPS
• reducing duplicate links per WP:OVERLINK
• removing bold used for emphasis and replacing with italics per MOS:NOBOLD
• removing links in the see also section that appear in the article per WP:SEEALSO

Primergrey (talk) 22:41, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

Slavic gerunds

As far as I can tell, Slavic "gerunds" don't actually exist, they don't fit the normal definition of gerunds (verb-noun). Many sources reasonably refer to them as verbal adverbs. Yet, many other sources (even those very same sources that mention the term "verbal adverb") also call them gerunds. As far as I've managed to figure out, the model for the usage of the term here seem to be Romance gerunds (which are, in that case, not gerunds either, they only descend from Latin gerunds). I'm still wondering if that was the original motivation for such clumsy naming in Slavic; the earliest examples of it that I've found are Kašić's Institutiones linguae Illyricae (1604), which might have been influenced by Italian terminology, since Kašić studied and worked in Rome, and Dobrovský's Instituiones linguae Slavicae dialecti veteris (1822).

Clearly there has to be something here in the article to explain what these "gerunds" are. But they shouldn't be treated as a real thing.

It's also highly problematic that some English sources try to explain these not-really-gerunds by comparing them to English gerunds. Slavic "gerunds" can be translated into English with -ing verbal forms, but those are not gerunds. For that reason, I removed my reference to R. Alexander's BCS grammar, as it could be misguiding, and there's the same sort of mistake in Wade's Russian grammar; the mistake is implicit in Sussex-Cubberley p.401-402.

An another issue are the few sources that apply the term to *-ьje deverbals. In principle these really do correspond to English and Latin gerunds, syntactically. However, I don't think they're verbal forms (product of inflection) but simply nouns in their own right (product of word formation). This view is pretty much universal, and these two sources are the sole exceptions that I've found (aside from Wikipedia itself, where no sources were provided for such classification). Perhaps there are others?

— Phazd (talk|contribs) 01:40, 19 June 2024 (UTC)