(n.) A kind of verbal noun, having only the four oblique cases of the singular number, and governing cases like a participle.
(n.) A verbal noun ending in -e, preceded by to and usually denoting purpose or end; -- called also the dative infinitive; as, "Ic haebbe mete to etanne" (I have meat to eat.) In Modern English the name has been applied to verbal or participal nouns in -ing denoting a transitive action; e. g., by throwing a stone.
Example Sentences:
(1) A gerund is a verb ending in -ing that acts as a noun: I like swimming, smoking is bad for you, and so on.
(2) A research on the acquisition of morphemes of plural, diminutive, augmentative, gerund, imperfect, and preterite with 109 Spanish children from 3 to 6 is reported.
(3) Thirty years on from the riots, one walks up Prince's Avenue, past what was the incinerated Rialto and the sign into Toxteth, and yet another sign promising imminent arrival into the "Regeneration Zone", and showing pictures of a perfect cereal-packet multiracial family, pristine modern houses and beautifully refurbished original stock – beneath which is the inevitable crass slogan that accompanies every corporate or political effort these days, always beginning with a pretentious gerund, in this case: "Creating neighbourhoods for the future".
(4) Four hundred and twenty-seven deaf students (age 10 to 19 years) and 60 hearing children (age eight to 10 years) judged the grammaticality of sample sentences which contained infinitival or gerundive complements.
(5) 7 Don't fear the gerund Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle's guide to life at St Custard's school , How to Be Topp, features a cartoon in which a gerund attacks some peaceful pronouns, but it is nothing to be afraid of.
Pronoun
Definition:
(n.) A word used instead of a noun or name, to avoid the repetition of it. The personal pronouns in English are I, thou or you, he, she, it, we, ye, and they.
Example Sentences:
(1) Their speech patterns, specifically pronoun use, were analyzed and support the postulate that a high frequency of self-references indicates memory loss and paucity of present experience.
(2) The study is longitudinal and compares the development of body communication and speech (here: the use of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and pronouns) during the 18-month period of rehabilitation.
(3) The use of singular and plural first-person pronouns provided a measure of individuality and mutuality in families of 18 field-dependent and 20 field-independent children (19 boys and 19 girls).
(4) Last year the blogger revealed that she was non-binary transgender , and now identifies as neither male nor female, though she says she prefers the use of female pronouns when being written about.
(5) He omitted 43% of articles, 40% of complementizers, 20% of pronouns, 27% of semantically marked prepositions, 43% of purely grammatic prepositions, and 22% of auxiliary verbs, but his average sentence length was 9.8 words and 64% of his sentences contained embedded clauses.
(6) Compensation of chronic volume load in aortic regurgitation is not compensated by an increased contractility but by ventricular enlargement and a pronouned increase in preload.
(7) Of the Moir storm, writer Tim Brown has decried in Spiked Online "a spectacle of feelings, a seething mass of self-affirming emotional incontinence, a carnival of first-person pronouns and expressions of hurt and proxy offence".
(8) Redistribution of parts of speech expressed in diminution of the proportion of verbs because of the predominance of pronouns and adverbs is explained by a reduced ability to formulate utterances, probably due to autism.
(9) Psychological investigations of pronoun resolution have implicitly assumed that the processes involved automatically provide a unique referent for every pronoun.
(10) The factors were (1) length in number of words, (2) complexity of personal pronouns and main verbs as scaled by Lee (1974), and (3) word familiarity, defined as common vocabulary or the substitution of a nonsense word in place of a typical noun or verb in the model sentence.
(11) Sometimes, the simplest of language, even pronouns, can be quite telling.
(12) These children's extraordinary problems with verb morphology are well documented, and preliminary evidence indicates frequent pronoun case errors (e.g., her for she) in their speech.
(13) The greatest difference was in syntactical elements, with manics using more action verbs, adjectives, and concrete nouns, while the depressed patients used more state of being verbs, modifying adverbs, first-person pronouns, and personal pronouns.
(14) The results suggest that Broca's aphasics' limitations in retrieving pronouns, and therefore other closed-class elements, are not a function of either phonological status, phrasal category, or grammatical relation.
(15) Mothers of children with Down syndrome were compared to mothers of nonretarded children with regard to the proportions of substantive deixis and of nouns (as opposed to pronouns) they used from the time when their children were prelinguistic until after they had started to talk.
(16) The use of the pronoun "I" when a speaker refers to his own actions, thoughts, or emotions is appropriate.
(17) These two strategies were tested by examining the interpretation of single object pronouns, first in a reading task and second in an assignment task.
(18) In naturally occurring, nonlaboratory settings, Studies 1 and 2 demonstrated a decrease in first-person singular pronoun usage as the proportionate number of discussants in a group increased.
(19) Changes in weight indices are more pronouned if the time of the effect coincides with that of intensive growth and maturation of the brain structure (N. I. Dmitrieva, 1966).
(20) They chose the main or minor character as referent for a pronoun in the next (target) sentence.