they take clauses, and eating functions as a verb in the clause eating cakes.
I agree with goofy. It may simply be a matter of terminology. Parts-of-speech-hood (aka syntactic categories) has always have always been a messy thing, but Greek and Roman grammarians did recognize participles as a distinct category from nouns and verbs. Like verbs they could have subjects or objects and like nouns they had number, gender, and case. In the '40s Zelig Harris, Chomsky's advisor, tried to get away from using terms like noun and verb altogether, and wanted to use more abstract classes like A, B, or Q. Most linguists these days follow, as does goofy here, a slot-replacement kind of approach to parts of speech. For example, what kind of syntactic slot does eating fill? It can be used as a noun:
1. Eating pleases me.
2. I like eating.
But it also sometimes fills the slot that looks more like a verb phrase:
3. Eating cakes pleases me.
4. I like eating cakes.
Somehow the nounness of eating is not quite the same as the nounness of meal.
5. Meals please me.
3. *Meals cakes please me.
OP
