From: Steve Davies (steve365@btinternet.com)
Date: Mon Jun 11 2001 - 11:28:59 MDT
-----Original Message-----
From: Lee Corbin <lcorbin@ricochet.net>
To: extropians@extropy.org <extropians@extropy.org>
Date: 10 June 2001 22:36
Subject: Re: Gerunds vs. Present Participles
>Steve Davies writes
>
>>Just to confuse things more there's the gerundive which
>>also ends in "ing" but is a verbal adjective ie it qualifies
>>a noun or pronoun. eg "the thinking man" - "thinking"
>>qualifies the noun "man".
>
>Well, this sounds like what that stupid web site I was
>at calls a "Present Participle". Erudite one! Is gerundive
>the same as "Present Participle", or if not, how are they
>different.
>
>Lee
I'm afraid that while some of what St Google says is true and correct the
following two are not.
>>>A great white shark ate Franciso's swimming coach.
>>>Swimming = present participle modifying coach
>>>
>>>Now Francisco only practices in swimming pools.
>>>Swimming = present participle modifying pools"
These are both gerundives, because (as it says) they are modifying nouns
(coach, pools). On the other hand in "This is a pool for swimming" swimming
is a present participle because it refers to the activity and is not being
used as a noun or an adjective. Basically, a participle in English is a word
ending in "ing" which is used as part of a verb or on its own to refer to
the action indicated by the verb. However it can also be used as a noun
(gerund) or as an adjective (gerundive). English uses participles a lot
because they are used to form the distinctive English phenomenon of the
progressive tenses which means as a language it has twice as many tenses as
most other languages eg it has two present indicative tenses as in "I swim"
and "I am swimming". (I got all this from doing Latin at high school-one of
the advantages of a classical education!) Steve Davies
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