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A Corpus-based Study of Transfers in English Gerunds

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Corpus-based Approaches to Grammar, Media and Health Discourses

Part of the book series: The M.A.K. Halliday Library Functional Linguistics Series ((TMAKHLFLS))

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Abstract

The English gerunds found in present-day English can be divided into nominal gerunds and verbal gerunds, with nominal gerunds being further divided into action nominal gerunds and result nominal gerunds (Heyvaert in Folia Linguistica 42(1)39–82, 2008). Nominal gerunds have the formal features of nouns (Fonteyn et al. in Journal of English Linguistics 43(1):36–60, 2015), taking “nominal dependents such as determiners, adjectives or genitive phrases” (Fanego in Diachronica 21(1):5–55, 2004: 6).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Note that He and Yang (2018) have proposed another type of verbalization, in the context of systemic functional linguistics. This alternative verbalization is characterized by the transfer from conjunction groups to verbal groups.

  2. 2.
    [at*]:

    article (e.g., a, the, no)

    [d*]:

    determiner (e.g., this, these, some, few)

    [y*]:

    any punctuation mark

    |:

    or

    [j*]:

    adjective (e.g., good, better, best, electrical)

    [app*]:

    possessive pronoun (e.g., my, your, our)

    [nn*]:

    common noun, neutral for number (e.g., sheep, cod, headquarter)

    *ing:

    any word with an -ing ending (e.g., sing, thing, doing, interesting)

    [pp*o]:

    objective personal pronoun (e.g., him, them, us)

    [vv*]:

    any form of lexical verb (e.g., work, works, gave, reading, taken)

    [v?g*]:

    present participle of lexical verb (e.g., giving, working)

    [i*]:

    any preposition (e.g., in, of, among)

  3. 3.

    In this study, all raw frequencies were normalized to the standard frequencies per million words to facilitate comparison.

  4. 4.

    In their work, Matthiessen and Halliday (Matthiessen and Halliday 1997/2009: 72) divided English grammar into four general ranks: clause, group/phrase, word, and morpheme.

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Funding

This research is supported by China National Social Science Fund [17BYY185].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China

    Qingshun He

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  1. Qingshun He
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Correspondence to Qingshun He .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Bingjun Yang

  2. School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Wen Li

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He, Q. (2020). A Corpus-based Study of Transfers in English Gerunds. In: Yang, B., Li, W. (eds) Corpus-based Approaches to Grammar, Media and Health Discourses. The M.A.K. Halliday Library Functional Linguistics Series. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4771-3_2

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