Terms "gerund" and "verbal adverb"
Olga Meerson
meersono at GEORGETOWN.EDU
Fri Feb 8 16:24:33 UTC 2008
Point(s) well taken. As to the historical rootedness of goriachij and goriashchij (and even rvanyj and porvannyj!) in the same type of a participle, I am well aware of that. Interestingly, I find it impossible to AVOID giving such a diachronic explanation to my students: part of their tasks is not only recognizing these forms but also forming them in a suitable context, and to do that correctly, one must know a thing or two about their genealogy--students not excluded. But the point is still well-taken: we will have to be aware of the fact that terminology simply does not translate from application in one language to another. But if so, then the good old latin gerund is better than the verbal adverb--the former at least allows for historical accuracy and accounts somehow for the difference between 'molcha" and "molchalivo". I am not propagating one terminology over the other (I am Russian, that is, neither British not American and also have no stakes in Latinisms, thanks to
my unfathomable ignorance, so as a Russian, deeprichastie still suits me best!)--simply trying to find out what is less confusing once explained at least once in the classroom.
----- Original Message -----
From: William Ryan <wfr at SAS.AC.UK>
Date: Friday, February 8, 2008 10:20 am
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Terms "gerund" and "verbal adverb"
> 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 Engl!
> ish
> > 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, dee!
> pri
> > 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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