participles/gerunds

[julieofsardis]

I'm really enjoying learning grammar, but these things are so foriegn to me. How can I tell the difference in what the "ing" word is being used for? I'm just not getting it.

Ex. They were laughing.

They is subject noun and were laughing is the intransitive verb with were being a helping(auxilary verb).

Ex. They were skating.

They is subject noun and were is the copula with skating being the DO.

Okay, how close am I? Why are these two different? I just sort of intuitively feel they're different, but I don't know why -- for next time.

HELP!!

Julie

[Lene Mahler Jaqua]

They were laughing

They were skating

Both cases are the same.
In both cases you can rewrite the sentence to say

They laughed
They skated


Therefore in both cases we are talking about
"were + ----ing" as a verb tense, not as a linkingverb/copula and a predicate adjective or noun.

They were sad....

would be parsed as

linking verb: were

Predicate adjective: sad

That is not exhaustive o n this subject... please ask more and I can go into more detail about participles and gerunds, and predicate adjectives and predicate nouns.

Those are difficult to handle in English because any form of the verb "to be" functions both as a linking verb and as a helping verb, which helps the main verb form another tense.

Good question and do not feel bad that this confuses you. It is a common problem we have all wrestled with.

Lene

[Tracy Gustilo]

And still do wrestle with! :-D

I have a general rule of thumb:

One never finds a participle (verbal form used as an adjective) as the subject complement (i.e. predicate adjective).

Take it instead as a verb phrase with helper and main verb.

Gerunds stand in as nouns. (Infinitives, the third type of verbal, can also stand in as nouns.) Therefore they can be used as the subject of a sentence or the direct object of a transitive verb. The test in that case would be that there is a transitive verb *plus* the gerund as DO.

My son loves writing.

What does he love? Writing.

Gerunds can also be used as a predicate noun with a linking verb. For that, the test is whether the subject itself is " doing" the thing the verbal indicates. So:

My son is writing. ["is writing" is the verb, aux and main -- My son writes.]
My favorite class is writing. ["is" links to the gerund "writing"]

Classes don't write, so you know the second sentence must have a gerund. (I can't think of a situation where the subject of a sentence would be a person and be linked to a gerund, so this should be a safe test.)

But you can also see if you can turn the gerund into an infinitive. You should always be able to do that, if it really is a gerund.

My favorite class is to write.

which is a little awkward, but it works, grammatically speaking.

HTH,
Tracy

[Carolyn]

We're in the middle of participles too, and those gerunds/participial adjectives do throw me.

However, I came across this example yesterday:

Horses sleep standing up.

After a great deal of discussion, it was decided that standing is a gerund functioning as an adverbial objective, as granted in DEG. Would you agree? How can such a simple sentence cause such grammatical angst? And what do I do when my children ask about it? (besides smile wisely and tell them they don't want to know the answer quite yet.)

[Lene Mahler Jaqua]

Carolyn

Your are giving ME grammar angst.

The horse is sleeping standing up.

I would have easily said that standing was a gerund, and that it is adverbial, but how DEG asserts that it is objective (accusative case) I do not understand. Perhaps it is just that any gerund functions as a noun and therefore has to be assigned a case... obviously it is not nominative, since it is not modifying the subject. With the severely limited number of cases in English being nominative, genetive, and accusative... and since it has no function of being possessive, .... AND since it modifies the verb, which is in the predicate, perhaps it is accusative for that reason?

Thanks, Lene