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Dr. Richard Nordquist is professor emeritus of rhetoric and English at Georgia Southern University and the author of several university-level grammar and composition textbooks.
Updated on March 23, 2020A gerund is a verbal that ends in -ing and functions as a noun. Adjective: gerundial or gerundival. The term gerund is used in traditional grammar, but many contemporary linguists prefer instead to use the -ing form instead.
A gerund accompanied by its objects, complements, and/or modifiers is called a gerund phrase or simply a noun phrase. Like nouns, gerunds and gerund phrases can function as subjects, objects, or complements in a sentence. Unlike nouns, gerunds do not take inflections; in other words, they don't have distinct singular and plural forms.
Etymology: From the Latin word "gerere," meaning "to carry on"
Pronunciation: JER-end
Any time you see an -ing verb functioning as a noun, you can be sure that you are dealing with a gerund. Use these examples to familiarize yourself with this special type of verbal.
Gerunds are formed from verbs and result in verbs, but they function as nouns. R.L. Trask does a great job of explaining this: "A gerund is derived from a verb by adding the suffix -ing. The result is still a verb, and it exhibits ordinary verbal properties, such as taking objects and adverbs. Example: In football, deliberately tripping an opponent is a foul. Here the verb trip occurs in its gerund form tripping, but this tripping is still a verb: it takes the adverb deliberately and the object an opponent.
However, the entire phrase deliberately tripping an opponent, because of the gerund within it, now functions as a noun phrase, in this case as the subject of the sentence. So, a gerund is still a verb, but the phrase built around it is nominal, not verbal," (Trask 2006).
It's important to remember that though gerunds share properties with nouns, they are not nouns and they work a little differently. "Because they are nounlike, we can think of gerunds as names. But rather than naming persons, places, things, events, and the like, as nouns generally do, gerunds, because they are verbs in form, name activities or behaviors or states of mind or states of being," (Kolln and Funk 1998).
Don't let yourself confuse gerunds, verbs acting as nouns, and participles, verbs acting as adjectives. Author June Casagrande admits that the two are easy to tangle. "Because some [participles] are identical to gerunds, they can get confusing:
Visiting relatives can be fun.
Does this mean that the act of visiting (visiting as a gerund) can be fun, or that relatives who are visiting (visiting as a modifier) can be fun? We don't know," (Casagrande 2010).
Bernard O'Dwyer also notes the similarities between participles and gerunds, a common source of confusion for readers and writers. "Present participles and gerunds look similar as words, and they also look similar as phrases. Again, it is the -ing verbal form that causes this problem."
He goes on to explain how to differentiate between the two: "To clearly distinguish these, we need to consider their grammatical functions. A present participle functions as a non-finite form of a verb phrase, after verbs of motion and position; it can be an adverb complement after these verbs; it can qualify/modify as an adjective does. In contrast, gerunds like nouns have naming roles and can occupy the place of nouns in many of their grammatical functions. Unlike nouns, they do not name persons, places, things, or events; they name actions, states, and behaviors," (O'Dwyer 2006).
The following excerpt from Analyzing English Grammar gives an example of a "borderline case" where a term could either be considered a gerund or participle in two different contexts that are only slightly different. "How do linguists decide unusual or borderline cases? They test difficult examples against various prototypical patterns and decide which pattern the case at hand most resembles. In the following examples, is listening a gerund or an adverbial participle?
45a. While listening to the concerto, Marcia decided to study music.
45b. After listening to the concerto, Marcia decided to study music.
Listening is a participle in (45a), and the phrase is adverbial. It is a reduced form of the adverbial subordinate clause While she was listening to the concerto. Listening in (45b) has a different origin. It cannot be derived from After she was listening to the concerto. In fact, after is a preposition in (45b) and listening to the concerto is a gerund phrase that can be replaced by the pronoun that," (Klammer et al. 2004).
Although a small number of traditional grammarians use the term gerundive as a synonym for gerund, the gerundive is a distinct verb form in Latin grammar. "There is no grammatical equivalent [to the Latin gerundive] in English, and the term is rarely used," (Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar).
