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Project

The development of nominal and verbat gerunds from Middle to Late Modern English: towards a semantic and discourse-functional analysis.

Analyses of the English gerund have tended to focus on verbal gerunds, on the formal conditions under which they arose in Middle and Early Modern English, and on their peculiar lexicogrammatical status in Present-day English. However, as suggested in Fanego (1996), Heyvaert (2008) and De Smet (2008), to come to full grips with the rise of the verbal gerund, we need to include the (changing role of the) nominal gerund into our scope and integrate existing formal descriptions into a more encompassing analysis that includes a semantic and discourse-functional perspective. To that end, this project (1) will analyze verbal as well as nominal gerunds; (2) extend the usual descriptive focus by including data from Late Modern English; (3) consider the semantics of the situation (types) that nominal and verbal gerunds can designate, and map out their discourse-functional behaviour.
Date:1 Jan 2012 →  31 Dec 2015
Keywords:Diachrony, Gerunds, Nominal gerund, Verbal gerund, Functional, Discursive-functional, Semantics
Disciplines:Theory and methodology of literary studies