Terms "gerund" and "verbal adverb"

[Richard Robin]

I have always been attentive to discussions about terminology, especially in
regard to Russian. When referring to the English "-ing" forms as reflected
in Russian, traditional terminology, even if linguistically accurate, makes
what is essentially an easy part of Russian grammar needlessly confusing. We
could simplify the situation for our students by throwing out old,
unfamiliar terms like gerund and participle and adopting descriptive words.
I propose the following:

- Verbal adverb - keep. Nice description. Except that students would get a
better feel for perfective verbal adverbs if we told them that they are
equivalent not only to "having done something," but also "after doing
something."

- Verbal adjective, present active, past active, and... past passive
PERFECTIVE (make it part of the name). The so-called present passives are
sort of a problem because in fact, they have nothing to do with the present
tense, but with repeated action like оплачиваемый, or permanent state, like
уважаемый. Most of them should be treated as vocabulary items anyway. I
don't know what to do about the PERFECTIVE participles like неотделимый,
except to call them -able/-ible forms.

- Verbal noun (usually -ение, -ание forms made from verbs like  плавание)

Changing traditional terminology to suit our learners is nothing new. We
used to talk about first and second conjugations. Now we talk about е/ё- and
и-theme verbs. We don't number the declensions as Russians do, but rather
give them descriptive names. And we refer to words like твой and этот as
modifiers, even though not calling them pronouns produces howls of protests
from Russians with a filfak education.



On Feb 6, 2008 12:11 AM, Jacee Cho <moscow3000 at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Zhenya,
>
> Gerund can be verbal adverb or participle or both depending on languages.
> It is verbal adverb in French and Esperanto. But in English, if I remember
> correctly (from my Linguistics course a long long time ago), gerund is a
> nominal form of a verb. So it would be Russian "otglagolnoe sushestvitelnoe"
> (verbal noun), and verbal adverb is "deeprechastie".  So, for example, you
> should be able to use gerund as a subject or object in English since it has
> a noun-like quality. (Smoking is bad,  I don't like smoking). Verbal adverb
> should be used instead of a clause.
>
> In some Russian textbooks...especially old ones....you see the term
> "gerund" often in a broad sense for verbal nouns, participles and verbal
> adverbs. As far as I know the term "gerund" is used less frequently in the
> Russian textbooks nowadays and they try to distinguish them as they are
> indeed different when it comes to their syntactic roles.
>
>
> Jacee
>
> Ji-Hyeon Jacee Cho University of Iowa Iowa City, IA 52242 319-594-4315
> "Soon It Shall Also Come To Pass"> Date: Tue, 5 Feb 2008 22:06:29 -0600>
> From: evgeny-pareshnev at UIOWA.EDU> Subject: [SEELANGS] Terms "gerund" and
> "verbal adverb"> To: SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU> > Dear SEELANGS, > > Could
> somebody tell me about the difference between English terms "gerund" and
> "verbal adverb" as relates to the Russian "deeprichastie", and what is the
> principal difference between these terms? The thing is, some textbooks for
> Russian use the term "gerund" and other textbooks have term "verbal adverb".
> Thank you in advance.> > > >
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-- 
Richard M. Robin, Ph.D.
Director Russian Language Program
Technical Advisor, GW Language Сenter
The George Washington University
Washington, DC 20008
202-994-7081
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