Terms "gerund" and "verbal adverb"

[pscotto at MTHOLYOKE.EDU]

Thank you Richard!

This is eminently sensible as both grammar and pedagogy.  However, I 
warn my students that they will hear some of the older terminology.

What bothers me is the "multi-directional"/"unidirectional" verbs so 
beloved our textbooks.

They are nothing of the sort.

That said verbs can accommodate motion that is multi- or 
uni-directional is only a logical consequence of their basic 
indeterminacy or determinacy in relation to time, not an inherent 
property of said verbs.

There is also no such thing as  a"round-trip" verbs, a term I have seen 
used to describe a sentence like "Ya otkrival okno." All that this 
sentence means is "Okno bylo otkryto."  However, you can force native 
speakers to tell you that the window went up and down if you bug them 
enough...

> 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 ????????????, or permanent state, like
> ?????????. Most of them should be treated as vocabulary items anyway. I
> don't know what to do about the PERFECTIVE participles like ???????????,
> except to call them -able/-ible forms.
>
> - Verbal noun (usually -????, -???? forms made from verbs like  ????????)
>
> Changing traditional terminology to suit our learners is nothing new. We
> used to talk about first and second conjugations. Now we talk about ?/?- and
> ?-theme verbs. We don't number the declensions as Russians do, but rather
> give them descriptive names. And we refer to words like ???? and ???? 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 ?enter
> The George Washington University
> Washington, DC 20008
> 202-994-7081
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Russkiy tekst v UTF-8
>



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