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#116028 11/18/03 04:10 AM
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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my contributions is to an other interesting set of irregular verbs.. like the spring/sprang/sprung...

this is a YART--but its so much fun...

nigh/near/next

i never put them 'together'(i read them somewhere) and i was gobsmacked...
spring them on your students, WW... i suppose only wordies like us are going to be impressed.. but maybe you'll out a wordie, or create one..


#116029 11/18/03 11:12 AM
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Carpal Tunnel
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Don't overgeneralize me, Dub' Dub. I'm saying that you can't slip an -ing word easily into a pigeon hole just by looking at its position in a sentence. If your candle ceremony were lighting something it might buy lighting as a participle. As it is, I'm sticking by adjectival noun gerund. Fire doesn't suddenly become an adjective because you have stuck it in front of the word hose in the phrase fire hose. It's an adjectival noun. The same with a substantive adjective, as in The Young and the Restless. The fact that those babies are *acting as nouns doesn't make them nouns.

Personally, I think if you try teaching these borderline cases to ninth graders you're going destroy any hope of getting them to like grammar.


#116030 11/19/03 01:35 AM
Joined: Apr 2000
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This entry from the Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar may help:

gerund
The -ing form of the verb when used in a partly noun-like way, as in No Smoking (in contrast to the same form used as a PARTICIPLE, e.g. Everyone was smoking). (Sometimes called verbal noun.)

Both the term gerund, from Latin grammar, and the term verbal noun are out of favour among some modern grammarians, because the nounlike and verblike uses of the -ing form exist on a cline. For example, in My smoking twnety cigarettes a day annoys them, smoking is nounlike in having a determiner (my) and in being the head of a phrase (my smoking twenty cigarettes a day), which is the subject of the sentence; but it is verblike in taking an object and adverbial (twenty cigarettes a day), and it retains verbal meaning.



In other words, there's a continuum where it's pretty obvious what's a gerund at one end and what's a participle at the other, but with a whole lot of uses with mixed features in the middle which are more like or less like each end. Whether you want to point this out to their young innocent trusting minds is another matter.

Bingley


Bingley
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