Look up verbal noun in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Historically, grammarians have described a verbal noun or gerundial noun as a verb form that functions as a noun[1]. An example of a verbal noun in English is 'sacking' as in the sentence "The sacking of the city was an epochal event" (wherein sacking is a gerund form of the verb sack).
A verbal noun, as a type of nonfinite verb form, is a term that some grammarians still use when referring to gerunds, gerundives, supines, and nominal forms of infinitives. In English however, verbal noun has most frequently been treated as a synonym for gerund.
Aside from English, the term verbal noun may apply to:
the citation form of verbs such as the masdar in Arabic and the verbal noun (berfenw) in Welsh[2]
declinable verb forms in Mongolian that can serve as predicates, comparable to participles but with a larger area of syntactic use [3]
In English, gerunds used as verbal nouns comprise the suffix -ing. Examples of such uses are given below:
Killing the president was an atrocious crime.
He was chastised for not leaving a tip for the server.
Creating a backup file might be a good idea.
Thanks for giving us a heads-up.
Infinitives used as verbal nouns generally occur as prefaced by the particleto:
To be or not to be is the question.
To become a U.S. president, one must be a natural born U.S. citizen.
Try to stay calm.
Finding time to exercise requires proper planning.
Infinitives used as verbal nouns may not be prefaced by the particle to, however, when elided via ellipsis:
Having proper contacts might help you (to) get you the job.
They couldn't help but (to) notice and (to) snicker at the wardrobe malfunction.
Verbs also may be nominalized through derivational processes suffixes (as in discovery from the verb discover) or by simple conversion, as with the noun love from the verb love. The formation of such deverbal nouns is not generally a productive process, that is, it cannot be indiscriminately applied to form nouns from any verb (for example, there is no noun *uncovery for the verb uncover). When they exist, such deverbal nouns often tend to replace the regularly formed verbal noun (as discovery is usually used rather than discovering, although the latter is still common as a gerund), or else a differentiation in meaning becomes established.
Notes
↑ Huddleston, Rodney D.; Pullum, Geoffrey K. (2002). The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p.81. ISBN0-521-43146-8.
Infinitive is a linguistics term for certain verb forms existing in many languages, most often used as non-finite verbs. As with many linguistic concepts, there is not a single definition applicable to all languages. The name is derived from Late Latin [modus] infinitivus, a derivative of infinitus meaning "unlimited".
In linguistics, a gerund is any of various nonfinite verb forms in various languages; most often, but not exclusively, one that functions as a noun. In English, it has the properties of both verb and noun, such as being modifiable by an adverb and being able to take a direct object. The term "-ing form" is often used in English to refer to the gerund specifically. Traditional grammar makes a distinction within -ing forms between present participles and gerunds, a distinction that is not observed in such modern grammars as A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language and The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.
In linguistics, a participle is a nonfinite verb form that has some of the characteristics and functions of both verbs and adjectives. More narrowly, participle has been defined as "a word derived from a verb and used as an adjective, as in a laughing face".
Verbs constitute one of the main parts of speech in the English language. Like other types of words in the language, English verbs are not heavily inflected. Most combinations of tense, aspect, mood and voice are expressed periphrastically, using constructions with auxiliary verbs.
In Portuguese grammar, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and articles are moderately inflected: there are two genders and two numbers. The case system of the ancestor language, Latin, has been lost, but personal pronouns are still declined with three main types of forms: subject, object of verb, and object of preposition. Most nouns and many adjectives can take diminutive or augmentative derivational suffixes, and most adjectives can take a so-called "superlative" derivational suffix. Adjectives usually follow their respective nouns.
In Latin grammar, a gerundive is a verb form that functions as a verbal adjective.
A nonfinite verb is a derivative form of a verb contrasted against finite verb forms in that they lack inflection for number or person, and in that they cannot perform action as the root of an independent clause. In English, nonfinite verbs include infinitives, participles and gerunds. Nonfinite verb forms in some other languages include converbs, gerundives and supines. The categories of mood, tense, and or voice may be absent from non-finite verb forms in some languages.
French conjugation refers to the variation in the endings of French verbs (inflections) depending on the person, tense and mood. Most verbs are regular and can be entirely determined by their infinitive form however irregular verbs require the knowledge of more than just the infinitive form known as the principal parts of which there are seven in French. With the knowledge of these seven principal parts of a verb one can conjugate almost all French verbs. However, a handful of verbs, including être, are highly irregular and the seven principal parts are not sufficient to conjugate the verb fully.
In linguistics, nominalization or nominalisation is the use of a word that is not a noun as a noun, or as the head of a noun phrase. This change in functional category can occur through morphological transformation, but it does not always. Nominalization can refer, for instance, to the process of producing a noun from another part of speech by adding a derivational affix, but it can also refer to the complex noun that is formed as a result.
In linguistics, a non-finite clause is a dependent or embedded clause that represents a state or event in the same way no matter whether it takes place before, during, or after text production. In this sense, a non-finite dependent clause represents one process as a circumstance for another without specifying the time when it takes place as in the following examples:
-ing is a suffix used to make one of the inflected forms of English verbs. This verb form is used as a present participle, as a gerund, and sometimes as an independent noun or adjective. The suffix is also found in certain words like morning and ceiling, and in names such as Browning.
Deverbal nouns are nouns that are derived from verbs or verb phrases.
German verbs may be classified as either weak, with a dental consonant inflection, or strong, showing a vowel gradation (ablaut). Both of these are regular systems. Most verbs of both types are regular, though various subgroups and anomalies do arise; however, textbooks for learners often class all strong verbs as irregular. The only completely irregular verb in the language is sein. There are more than 200 strong and irregular verbs, but just as in English, there is a gradual tendency for strong verbs to become weak.
In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns and adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carry grammatical information or lexical information . Inflection changes the grammatical properties of a word within its syntactic category. Derivational suffixes fall into two categories: class-changing derivation and class-maintaining derivation.
An attributive verb is a verb that modifies a noun in the manner of an attributive adjective, rather than express an independent idea as a predicate.
In linguistic morphology, inflection is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness. The inflection of verbs is called conjugation, and one can refer to the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, participles, prepositions and postpositions, numerals, articles, etc., as declension.
This article deals with the grammar of the Udmurt language.
This article deals with the grammar of the Komi language of the northeastern European part of Russia
In Celtic languages such as Welsh, a verb-noun is used to refer to the basic form of a verb and is the form usually listed in a dictionary.
This article describes the uses of various verb forms in modern standard English language. This includes:
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
