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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 the job.
They couldn't help but (to) notice and (to) snicker at the wardrobe malfunction.
Verbs also may be nominalized through derivational processes, such as 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".
A split infinitive is a grammatical construction in which an adverb or adverbial phrase separates the "to" and "infinitive" constituents of what was traditionally called the "full infinitive", but is more commonly known in modern linguistics as the to-infinitive. In the history of English language aesthetics, the split infinitive was often deprecated, despite its prevalence in colloquial speech. The opening sequence of the Star Trek television series contains a well-known example, "to boldly go where no man has gone before", wherein the adverb boldly was said to split the full infinitive, to go. Multiple words may split a to-infinitive, such as: "The population is expected to more than double in the next ten years."
In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech is a category of words that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are assigned to the same part of speech generally display similar syntactic behavior, sometimes similar morphological behavior in that they undergo inflection for similar properties and even similar semantic behavior. Commonly listed English parts of speech are noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, interjection, numeral, article, and determiner.
In linguistics, a gerund is any of various nonfinite verb forms in various languages; most often, but not exclusively, it is one that functions as a noun. The name is derived from Late Latin gerundium, meaning "which is to be carried out". In English, the gerund 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".
The continuous and progressive aspects are grammatical aspects that express incomplete action or state in progress at a specific time: they are non-habitual, imperfective aspects.
Non-finite verbs, are verb forms that do not show tense, person, or number. They include:
Infinitives - They often function as nouns or the base form of a verb
Gerunds - These act as nouns but are derived from verbs
Participles - These can function as adjectives or part of verb tenses
In linguistics, nominalization or nominalisation, also known as nouning, 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:
ʾIʿrāb is an Arabic term for the declension system of nominal, adjectival, or verbal suffixes of Classical Arabic to mark grammatical case. These suffixes are written in fully vocalized Arabic texts, notably the Qur’ān or texts written for children or Arabic learners, and they are articulated when a text is formally read aloud, but they do not survive in any spoken dialect of Arabic. Even in Literary Arabic, these suffixes are often not pronounced in pausa ; i.e. when the word occurs at the end of the sentence, in accordance with certain rules of Arabic pronunciation. Depending on the knowledge of ʾiʿrāb, some Arabic speakers may omit case endings when reading out in Modern Standard Arabic, thus making it similar to spoken dialects. Many Arabic textbooks for foreigners teach Arabic without a heavy focus on ʾiʿrāb, either omitting the endings altogether or only giving a small introduction. Arabic without case endings may require a different and fixed word order, similar to spoken Arabic dialects.
-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.
In descriptions of the Japanese language, an adjectival noun, nominal adjective, copular noun, adjectival verb, quasi-adjective, pseudo-adjective, adjectival, or na-adjective, is a noun that can function as an adjective by taking the particle 〜な -na. Adjectival nouns constitute one of several Japanese word classes that can be considered equivalent to adjectives.
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, while the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, etc. can be called declension.
In linguistics, a nominal sentence is a sentence without a finite verb. As a nominal sentence does not have a verbal predicate, it may contain a nominal predicate, an adjectival predicate, in Semitic languages also an adverbial predicate or even a prepositional predicate. In Egyptian-Coptic, however, as in the majority of African languages, sentences with adverbial or prepositional predicate show a distinctly different structure. The relation of nominal sentences to verbal sentences is a question of tense marking. In most languages with nominal sentences such as Russian, Arabic and Hebrew, the copular verb does not surface in indicatival present tense sentences. Conversely, these languages allow the copular verb in non-present sentences.
This article deals with the grammar of the Udmurt language.
The grammar of Modern Hebrew shares similarities with that of its Biblical Hebrew counterpart, but it has evolved significantly over time. Modern Hebrew grammar incorporates analytic, expressing such forms as dative, ablative, and accusative using prepositional particles rather than morphological cases.
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.
Modern standard English has various verb forms, including:
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