Use of term "gerund" (Russian)

[Nicole Monnier]

Dear SEELANGStsy,

Twice in the past week, I've had two students ask about the use of the term
"gerund" to refer to Russian verbal adverbs (deeprichastiia), and not verbal
nouns, as is common in English. Not being a linguist (!), I thought I would
post the second - and testier - of these queries to the list.

> I am not sure you will have the answer to this question as it is a rather odd
> and perhaps overly finicky question, but it is a matter that has irritated me
> for the better part of a year, thus I ask it all the same. Why do Slavonic
> linguists and pedagogues choose to stand apart from seemingly all other
> linguists and hundreds of years of tradition in using the term 'gerund' to
> refer to verbal adverbs rather than the verbal nouns? I initially thought it
> was simply an anomaly of the third-year textbook, then I saw it in a few
> articles, and finally I went back and looked through various Russian grammars
> and found that all of those which used the term 'gerund' used it to refer to
> verbal adverbs. In contrast to this, every time I have encounter the term
> outside the realm of Slavonic languages it has referred to verbal nouns
> (indeed I always found it slightly humorous that the word 'gerund' was itself
> derived from a gerund). Admittedly, in English the situation is somewhat
> confused by the use of the -ing suffix for both verbal nouns and verbal
> adverbs (compare: 'Ringing the doorbell, he noticed the door was open.' and
> 'The ringing of the bell drove the man insane.'), and I don't fully understand
> why my Old English textbook uses the term 'inflected infinitive' in addition
> to 'gerund' to refer to verbal nouns, but at least 'gerund' is used properly.
> Why can't Slavicists at least do the same?

Best,

Nicole


****************************
Dr. Nicole Monnier
Assistant Professor of Instruction
Director of Undergraduate Studies (Russian)
German & Russian Studies
415 GCB
University of Missouri
Columbia, MO 65211

phone: 573.882.3370

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