Use of term "gerund" (Russian)

[Alina Israeli]

>> 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.

The attitude is definitely a problem.

>>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?

In addition to what Bob Rothstein wrote, verbal nouns in Russian, are just
nouns, they are not grammatical forms of a verb, unlike English, where we
find
         Tyler's singing, Seeing is believing etc.

In other words, one has to distinguish form formation, as is the case of
verbal noun in English, and word formation, as is the case of verbal nouns
in Russian.

Now on the subject of gerund, my Concise Oxford Dict of linguistics says for

gerund. A nominal form of verbs in Latin; e.g. pugnando 'by fighting'.
Hence a term available for verb forms with a noun like role in other
languages: e.g. Eglish fighting is traditionally a gerund in Fighting used
to be fun, as opposed to the participlem also in -ing but with a different
syntactic role, in people fighting.

the next entry is

gerundive. An adjectival form of verbs in Latin, e.g. Dolenda est Carthago
[destroy-gerund-nom.sg.fem is Carthage] 'Carthage must be destroyed'

As far as I am concerned, English verbal adverb is still missing from the
definitions, examples of which are:

Having said that...
She walked looking around.
As I sat there pretending to be asleep, ...


That same dictionary also has an entry on

-ing form. A verb form in English such as sleeping in those sleeping, We
were sleepng, I like sleeping, Sleeping was impossible. Often so called
because no term inherited form the grammatical tradition such as present
participle or gerund is appropriate to all these uses.

So says the Oxford dictionary (Oxford U Press, 1997). So tell your student
to chill out and not to try to use borrowed tags for wrong entities.

Alina

__________________________
 Alina Israeli
 LFS, American University
 4400 Mass. Ave., NW
 Washington, DC 20016

 phone:    (202) 885-2387
 fax:      (202) 885-1076 

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