Distributional Properties and Endocentricity of English Gerunds

This paper attempts to resolve problems involving distributional properties and endocentricity of English genrund constructions. This paper identifies two syntactic types 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 verb categories, this paper proposes that there are cases of control involving gerunds as in infinitives. Specifically, this paper claims that control is not limited to gerundive complements of verbs but can be extended to prepositional complements. This proposal not only resolves the distributional properties of the gerund construction but also captures syntactic parallelism observable between gerunds and to-infinitives in English.