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Development of the Gerund

§ 474. The Late ME period witnessed the growth of a new verbal known in modern grammars as the Gerund. The gerund can be traced to three sources: the OE verbal noun in -unʒ and -inʒ, the Present Parti­ciple and the Infinitive. In OE the verbal noun derived from transitive verbs took an object in the Gen. case, which corresponded to the direct object of the finite verb; cf. OE sēo fēding pāra scēapa equivalent to ‘the feeding of the sheep’ with hie fēdap pā scēap ‘they feed the sheep’, The syntactic functions of the verbal noun, the infinitive and the parti­ciple partly overlapped. In ME the Present Participle and the verbal noun became identical: they both ended in -ing. This led to the confusion of some of their features: verbal nouns began to take direct objects like participles and infinitives. This verbal feature — a direct object as well as the frequent absence of article before the -ing-form functioning as a noun — transformed the verbal noun into a Gerund in the modern understanding of the term. The disappearance of the inflected infinitive contributed to the change, as some of its functions were taken over by the Gerund.

The earliest instances of a verbal noun resembling a Gerund date from the 12th c. Chaucer uses the -ing-form in substantival functions in both ways: with a prepositional object like a verbal noun and with a direct object, e. g. in getynge on your richesse and (he usinge hem ‘in getting your riches and using them’. In Early NE the -ing-form in the function of a noun is commonly used with an adverbial modifier and with a direct ob­ject — in case of transitive verbs, e. g.:

Tis pity ... That wishing well had not a body in’t

Which might be felt. (Shakespeare)

Drink, being poured out of a cup into a glass, by filling the one,

doth empty the other. (Shakespeare)

Those were the verbal features of the Gerund. The nominal features, retained from the verbal noun, were its syntactic functions and the abil­ity to be modified by a possessive pronoun or a noun in the Gen. case:

And why should we proclaim it in an hour before his entering? (Shakespeare)

In the course of time the sphere of the usage of the Gerund grew: it replaced the Infinitive and the Participle in many adverbial functions; its great advantage was that it could be used with various prepositions, e. g.:

And now he fainted and cried, in fainting, upon Rosalind.

Shall we clap into’t roundly without hawking, or spitting, or saying we are hoarse... (Shakespeare) (see also the example above: by filling).

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