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The Latin gerund, in a restricted set of syntactic contexts, denotes the sense of the verb in isolation after certain prepositions, and in certain uses of the genitive, dative, and ablative cases. It is very rarely combined with a dependent sentence element such as an object .
These are not gerund forms; the -um form of the gerund is used only after prepositions. The plural forms without nouns such as agenda 'things to be done' are also adjectival gerundives; the gerund has no plural form. For details of the formation and usage of the Latin gerundive, see Latin conjugation § Gerundive and Latin syntax § The gerundive.
A gerund is a verb form that appears in positions that are usually reserved for nouns. In English, a gerund has the same form as a progressive active participle and so ends in -ing. Gerunds typically appear as subject or object noun phrases or even as the object of a preposition:
Some examples: He is the man to beat. (infinitival clause with zero object; the man is understood as the object) That car wants looking at straight away. (gerund-participial clause with zero preposition complement after at) The building was given a new lease of life. (past-participial clause with zero indirect object)
Latin word order is relatively free. The verb may be found at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a sentence; an adjective may precede or follow its noun (vir bonus or bonus vir both mean 'a good man'); [5] and a genitive may precede or follow its noun ('the enemies' camp' can be both hostium castra and castra hostium; the latter is more common). [6]
For example, the prepositional phrase after midnight can be modified by adverb phrases such as shortly (shortly after midnight) or quite obviously (quite obviously after midnight). [ 14 ] : 643–645 A subset of adverb phrase modifiers of prepositions express degree and occur within prepositional phrases but not other phrasal categories.
When the adjectival form is followed by a verb, the gerund is used: I am used to going to college in the mornings. I used to drink black coffee means that in the past I drank black coffee, but now I don't. Used to describes an action that did happen, but does not happen now. [9] When I was younger I used to play with toys, but I don't any more.
Dependent clauses may be headed by an infinitive, gerund, or other non-finite verb form, which in linguistics is called deranked. For instance: Sit up straight while singing. In these cases, the subject of the dependent clause may take a non-nominative form. An example is: I want him to vanish.