Gerunds without phrase structure

Last updated 8^th April 2003

RICHARD HUDSON

Bibliographical information

The ideas in this paper were first presented in a paper to the Linguistics Association of Great Britain conference in April 1999. The first complete version was called "Gerunds and multiple default inheritance" and was published in UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 2000 (vol 12, pp. 303-335). It incorporated a number of suggestions made by participants at the LAGB talk, and benefited greatly from comments and bibliographical suggestions by David Denison and Chet Creider (who has developed similar ideas in his own paper "Mixed Categories in Word Grammar: Swahili Infinitival Nouns", Linguistica Atlantica 21, 53-68). The present version is a resubmission to NLLT and was written in July 2002; it incorporates suggestions from Rob Malouf and two anonymous referees. It has now been accepted for publication in NLLT, so presumably it should appear some time in 2003.

Abstract

In general, English gerunds such as (We were talking about) John having a sabbatical combine the internal characteristics of a clause with the external characteristics of a noun phrase. Previous analyses have tried to recognise the mixed character of gerunds by assigning them two separate nodes, one verbal and the other nominal. However dependency analyses such as Word Grammar do not allow analyses of this kind, because only one node is recognised per word. Two-node analyses are strong evidence against dependency analysis so it is important to be sure that they are needed. The present paper presents an analysis similar to the one recently proposed by Malouf in which the verbal and nominal classifications are combined on a single node which inherits both verbal and nominal characteristics; but unlike Malouf's analysis it does not assume phrase structure. Like Malouf's, it exploits the logic of multiple default inheritance which allows a single node to inherit from two supercategories - in this case from both 'verb' and 'noun'; and as Malouf points out, multiple inheritance works because English grammar is organised in such a way that the characteristics of these categories are orthogonal. In short, a gerund is both a verb and a noun, as in traditional analyses. Simple stipulations are needed to allow for 'possessive' subjects (e.g. about John's having a sabbatical) and a number of very specific constructions peculiar to gerunds: no in prohibitions or existentials (e.g. No playing loud music! There's no mistaking that voice), and a very few constructions which demand a gerund rather than a noun phrase (e.g. It's no use ..., They prevented us from ...).