Platonov 'Never to return'

[Patricia Chaput]

To follow up on Wayles Brown's comments, the 
current language for characterizing gerunds/verbal 
adverbs is that

-they no longer have tense, only aspect, so in the 
contemporary language they are only imperfective 
or perfective;

-they are specifically timeless in morphology, 
unlike their tensed counterparts (present or past 
tense forms);

-because of the variety of adverbial and tensed 
phrases that they can replace, all that we can say 
is that the clause with gerund/verbal adverb is 
*subordinate* to the action of the main clause.

It would seem that gerunds/verbal adverbs might 
particularly appeal to Platonov and his 
non-linearity.  I am not sure that you can come up 
with a comparable subtlety in English for this 
particular construction.

Pat Chaput
Harvard University


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