Adverbial participles!!

[Gil Rappaport]

Thanks for the corrections, Loren and George. They just strengthen the case
against the term `gerund'.

That conceded (?), which is better, verbal adverb or adverbial participle?
To my previous arguments in favor of the latter, I would add that the
question is what is the form's `essence' and what is its `accidence'. To me
these are basically verbal forms, used in clauses of particular types, not
essentially adjectives/adverbs with certain verbal characteristics. George's
contrast in Macedonian makes the point:

(i) chetene(*to) knigata 'reading the book'

(ii) chetene(to) na knigata 'reading of the book'


(i) has verbal/clausal syntax, (ii) has nominal/Noun Phrase syntax. The
first one is truly a gerund (touche, George!), the latter a deverbal noun (a
noun morphologically derived from a verb). Similar contrasts can be drawn
for adverbial and adjectival participles, vis-a-vis `deverbal adjectives'
and `deverbal adverbs' (pace Len Babby - wait a minute, I thought Len wrote
a paper on precisely this point!?). If anybody's interested, I can trot out
the examples: to mind come such cases as `sidja', `lezha', `molcha', which
are considered in traditional grammars as `frozen' adverbial participles
functioning in the modern language as adverbs (and distinguished from the
latter by stress). Morphological productivity is different from syntactic
essence: deverbal nouns (as opposed to gerunds proper, in my sense) may or
may not be productive (cf. well-documented difference in productivity
between Polish/Czech and Russian on this score).

Who cares? Conceding that terms cannot necessarily be carried over
automatically from one language to another, I think we should TRY to get
them to line up, and be descriptive, and to be consistent in our usage, to
the extent possible. It seems possible here. Not only does it help
instructors/analysts think about the nature of the beast, but the advantage
of terminological uniformity for students is obvious...

--Gil Rappaport