Remarks on gerunds

This paper defends the traditional view that gerunds and participles straddle word classes, and that the hybrid character of these elements reflects categorial neutrality. However, neutrality is confined to lexical entries and resolved in the syntagmatic structures that they describe. The proposal is illustrated by analyses of English gerunds and Welsh verbal nouns. The resulting analyses suggest a somewhat unexpected rapprochement between the Lexicalist Hypothesis of Chomsky (1970) and the lexicalist orientation of contemporary constraintbased approaches.

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