A Constraint-based Approach to English Gerunds

This paper attempts to provide an alternative analysis involving categorical issues related to English gerunds. Especially, this paper rejects Maulof's approach that creates a new syntactic category gerund by mixing nominal and verbal categories. This paper identifies two syntactic structures in English gerunds: nominal gerunds and verbal gerunds. This distinction is based on syntactic and semantic characteristics of each type and is intended to account for the external distribution and endocentricity of the construction. Treating verbal gerunds syntactically as verbal categories, this paper proposes that English verbal gerunds act like other verbal categories such as infinitives whereas nominal gerunds behaves much like derived nominals. This paper proposes a few lexical rules that can take care of the two types of gerunds. The proposal can be extended to prepositional complements as well as sentential subject positions. This proposal not only resolves the issues involving distributional properties of the gerund construction but also captures syntactic parallelism observable between gerunds and other verbal constructions in English.