Terms "gerund" and "verbal adverb"

[William Ryan]

I sympathize with Olga Meersom's problem. However, it may well be that a terminology which suits both specialists in the theories of universal grammar and teachers in classroom contexts is unattainable, especially if one is teaching students who have never been exposed to foreign languages, perhaps not even to the notion of formal grammar. 

I offer a few thoughts (but no solutions) on specific points in Olga's posting:

'verbal adverb ... may be confused with non-gerund adverbs deriving from a verb, e.g., molchalivo as opposed to molcha'. 
That should not be a problem - molchalivo is not formed from the verb but from the adjective.

'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.)' 
If you link 'parts-of-speech' terminology with derivation it is hard to avoid a diachronic explanation - historically goriachij, rvanyj etc WERE participles, goriashchij etc are Church Slavonicisms which have acquired specific functions, and the '(im)perfectiveness' of verbs has developed historically and has fluctuated in the past. However, unless you are teaching a fairly sophisticated class specializing in the history of the language, this information is unlikely to be illuminating! 

'the problem with 'gerund' is all inherent to the English language'. 
Not really - it would be truer to say that the problem arises from the fact that historically European grammarians have insisted on imposing the traditional taxonomy and terminology of Latin grammar onto modern vernacular languages. Both Western and Russian grammarians tried to do the same to Russian at one time - see Ludolph or Lomonosov - and to some extent we all still cling to the old model. Up to the nineteenth century this was not unreasonable - Latin was taught in schools and universities, modern languages were not; it no doubt seemed sensible to try to extrapolate from the known to the unknown, to use an established descriptive model of enormous prestige when describing a new language.

Will Ryan





Olga Meerson wrote:
> 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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