(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.
Verb
Definition:
(n.) A word; a vocable.
(n.) A word which affirms or predicates something of some person or thing; a part of speech expressing being, action, or the suffering of action.
Example Sentences:
(1) It was found that labelling the picture with a sentence containing a specific verb substantially increased the likelihood that the specific picture corresponding to that verb would subsequently be falsely recognized.
(2) The focus of both studies was on children in their second year of life learning verbs in various pragmatic contexts.
(3) Last week he argued that properly primed immigrants will "see off the racists" - as if once blacks and Asians could conjugate their verbs properly and learn the date of the Battle of Agincourt, then racists would refrain from attacking them.
(4) (2) The emergence of the distinction between ST and NST verbs is gradual rather than sudden.
(5) An analysis of the types of verbs used in self-thoughts evoked by family versus school probes supported the six predicted differences in verb types derived from our postulate of a more passive self-concept in the family context.
(6) Finally, we discuss whether a mixed model containing both verb-based and class-based mechanisms is required to explain the actionality effects.
(7) These data suggest that the problems agrammatic subjects show with verbs in sentence comprehension, and the general lexical access deficit also recently claimed to be part of the agrammatics' problem, may not extend to the real-time processing of verbs and their arguments.
(8) As predicted, the younger children were better at correcting the nouns than the verbs; the two grammatical forms were corrected equally well by the older children.
(9) A difference between verbs and nouns remained even when level of concreteness was controlled.
(10) Thirdly we investigate his comprehension of semantically and thematically related nouns and verbs.
(11) 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.
(12) In comparison to normal children, they had a shorter MLU and upper bound, and a smaller vocabulary, including fewer verbs.
(13) The verb-based account predicts that children should show a consistent pattern of responses for individual verbs on test and re-test.
(14) The most frequent verbs acquired were the perception verbs see and look and the epistemic verbs think and know.
(15) 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.
(16) Exceptions were noted for the normals on the verb class and for the Wernicke's aphasics on the NP and VP linguistic constituents.
(17) In a naturalistic study of 24 children at 1;3 and 1;9, it was found that mothers modelled verbs for their children most often BEFORE the referent action actually occurred.
(18) As with the horrible “This is what a feminist looks like” T-shirt, we are again using the wrong verbs.
(19) The verb phrase (VP) anaphora is a commonly used construction in English in which part of a sentence, including the verb, is replaced or deleted.
(20) Verb learning is clearly a function of observation of real-world contingencies; however, it is argued that such observational information is insufficient to account fully for vocabulary acquisition.