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The Modern English-ing ending, which is used to form both gerunds and present participles of verbs (i.e. in noun and adjective uses), derives from two different historical suffixes. The gerund (noun) use comes from Middle English-ing, which is from Old English-ing, -ung (suffixes forming nouns from verbs).
The -ing form (going, writing, climbing), used as a present participle, gerund, (de)verbal noun, and sometimes (de)verbal adjective The verb be has a larger number of different forms ( am , is , are , was , were , etc.), while the modal verbs have a more limited number of forms.
Adjective phrases containing complements after the adjective cannot normally be used as attributive adjectives before a noun. Sometimes they are used attributively after the noun , as in a woman proud of being a midwife (where they may be converted into relative clauses: a woman who is proud of being a midwife ), but it is wrong to say * a ...
Such adjective phrases can be integrated into the clause (e.g., Love dies young) or detached from the clause as a supplement (e.g., Happy to see her, I wept). Adjective phrases functioning as predicative adjuncts are typically interpreted with the subject of the main clause being the predicand of the adjunct (i.e., "I was happy to see her"). [11]
An -ing form is termed gerund when it behaves as a verb within a clause (so that it may be modified by an adverb or have an object); but the resulting clause as a whole (sometimes consisting of only one word, the gerund itself) functions as a noun within the larger sentence.
In English, most words are uninflected, while the inflected endings that exist are mostly ambiguous: -ed may mark a verbal past tense, a participle or a fully adjectival form; -s may mark a plural noun, a possessive noun, or a present-tense verb form; -ing may mark a participle, gerund, or pure adjective or noun.
Initial-stress derivation is a phonological process in English that moves stress to the first syllable of verbs when they are used as nouns or adjectives. (This is an example of a suprafix.) This process can be found in the case of several dozen verb-noun and verb-adjective pairs and is gradually becoming more standardized in some English ...
The compounds shown here are bare, but more commonly, a suffixal morpheme is added, such as -ed: a two-legged person is a person with two legs, and this is exocentric. On the other hand, endocentric adjectives are also frequently formed, using the suffixal morphemes -ing or -er/or.