0 INTRODUCTION

2. –ING NOMINALS: ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT
However, authors such as Declerck (1991: 494) argue against feature 2 proposed by
Jespersen. For Declerck, “gerund[s] cannot take nominal morphemes,” and they should be
distinguished from “ing-forms that are derived from verb stems and that can take the
nominal plural morpheme such as building(s) and cutting(s)” (1991: 494, footnote 2).
According to this view, the latter are deverbal nouns which do not share any of the
syntactic characteristics of the gerund and should therefore be considered true nouns, not
gerund forms.
It must be noted that in most working definitions of the gerund that have been used
up to this point, and as Huddleston (2002a: 82) points out, authors
have used the formulation “as or like” in talking of the functional
resemblance between a gerund and a noun, leaving open the issue of
whether the word is verb or noun. Dictionaries tend to define the gerund
as a verbal noun, but there are strong grounds for analyzing [a gerund]
as a verb.
This controversy is the result of the gerund’s gradual acquisition of the following
verbal syntactic qualities (Jespersen 1940 [1909]. Vol. V: 89-90):
1. ability to accept adverbs freely
2. ability to form a perfect
3. ability to form a passive, also a perfect passive
4. ability to take an object without the preposition of
5. ability to take a subject without a preposition
6. ability to be preceded by there as “lesser subject”
Fanego (1996: 98) adds the following verbal properties to those mentioned above: “it
became capable of governing a predicative complement (…), it could be negated by the
V[erb]P[hrase]-negating particle not (…) and it could take a subject in a case other than
the genitive.”
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