Terms "gerund" and "verbal adverb"

[Olga Meerson]

The only problem I have with verbal adverb is that it may be confused with non-gerund adverbs deriving from a verb, e.g., molchalivo as opposed to molcha, etc. Our students have already many occasions to confuse participles with verb-derived adjectives (e.g., polzuchij vs. polzushchij; goriachij/ goriuchij vs. goriashchij, etc., not even mentioning the passive-participle-like adjectives deriving from a past passive participle but from an imperfective verb-- rvanyj, zvanyj, etc.). In practice, I always tell my students that the problem with 'gerund' is all inherent to the English language--it has too many uses in English and a very defined use in Russian :) But then again, english grammar is very often contextual and not morphological: fly / a fly can be a verb or a noun, and so can virtually every word of that sort--all the artificial rules against "verbing a noun" notwithstanding. Why not gerunds then, that in English are defined as adverbs or nouns by the context and in Ru
ssian by morphology? In 'Writing letters is hard' writing functions as a noun because it is the subject, i.e., through the context. Why not say the same about 'The run is long', as opposed to 'Run, Forest, run'? The fact that in the first case, 'run' is a noun and in the second, a verb, in no way suggests that the CATEGORIES of nouns and verbs should be abolished in English. The same is especially true about adjectives: a river bank has 'river' function as an adjective only because it precedes the word bank and follows the article. In Russian, however, 'rechnoj bereg' will never be adequately replaced with 'reka bereg', or even 'reki bereg'. In English, part of speech are not defined by morphology at all. And yet, in this case we do have some morphology operating--the '-ing'. Yes, in English gerund is indeed a morphological "thing" ("the -ing"), but whether it be an adverb or a noun does not depend on this marked morphology.  Defining what part of speech a word is, in English
 depends (by now) solely on what part of the sentence it is. In Russian, in contrast, the parts of speech are always (minus homonymic puns) defined by morphology. English is not a language that makes new words by using too many different suffixes and prefixes around the same root. Russian is. This has a direct bearing on how to classify gerunds in relation to deeprichastie: the notion in Russian is syntactic INSOFAR as its morphology is consistently recognizable, while in English, the syntactic function is simply not defined by morphology--in the case of gerunds or otherwise. So why make an exception for them and complicate the terminology? In English we know if we see an adverbial gerund / verb / noun / adjective only by context. In Russian, morphology must collude. So all terms will inevitably fall short: gerund, in English, is not a part of speech but a pattern in word-formation. I don't know if this suggests that we should stick to verba; adverbs or not (after all, deepri
chastie IS a part of speech, not merely a pattern of morphology). But patterns of morphology in words like "molcha" and "molchalivo" differ greatly, although both of them are adverbs. How do we solve that problem?       

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