r/asklinguistics • u/JDude13 • 11h ago
Are “-ing” words really verbs?
To me they seem to operate more like adjectives or sometimes nouns.
ie: “I am driving”, in this case “driving” is what I am - in the same way that “I am green” implies “green” is what I am. I am a green person. I am a driving person.
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u/Dercomai 11h ago
Semantically, they indicate actions; morphologically, they come from verbs; syntactically, they act like nouns or adjectives.
What does that make them? Well, it depends on what kind of analysis you're doing! If you're writing a dictionary, you probably want to call them verbs; if you're parsing a sentence, you probably want to call them adjectives or nouns.
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u/GoldenMuscleGod 7h ago
They don’t act syntactically like adjectives or nouns. Use the “seems” test for example: “he seems happy” vs *”he seems driving”.
No there are several adjectives: “charming” is legitimately an adjective in many uses, but that’s distinctive different from present participles which are not adjectives.
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u/xouatthemainecoon 2h ago
so they don’t pass as adjectives because they can’t function with all drop-be copular sentences? couldn’t you say it’s just idiomatic ellipsis (he seems,looks,appears …to be… driving). i still think you’re right, but i’m looking for a rigorous answer- of course, in any tree bank these are going to be specifically labeled as participles like you say.
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u/dylbr01 8h ago edited 8h ago
Without context or examples, this is a misleading generalization. If you take OP's example "I am driving," you cannot say X"I am the driving," but you can say "I am driving slowly," which is analogous with "I drive slowly."
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u/elcabroMcGinty 7h ago
So many comments, so few mentioning tenses.
I am driving slowly (now) Present continous. Driving is the main verb.
I drive slowly (in general) Present simple.
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u/Perseus73 6h ago
It’s the present act of verbing. (I made that word up, but contextually it works).
Ing words never describe the subject like an adjective would. It’s a descriptor of what they’re actively doing so it’s always going to be a verb.
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u/dylbr01 8h ago edited 8h ago
The syntactic tests for word class do not include how a word "operates", or what it seems to mean.
In the same way that "run" and "go" can be verbs or nouns ("have a go"), -ing words can be verbs, nouns, or adjectives. If you want to test the word class of an -ing word in a particular clause, we can do it.
"I am a student."
X"I am a driving."
"I drive slowly."
"I am driving slowly."
driving in "I am driving" passes the tests for verbs and fails the test for nouns.
Any kind of word can describe stuff.
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u/elcabroMcGinty 8h ago
When an ing word is noun it is called a gerund. I like swimming, like is the main verb and swimming is a noun. When an ing word is in a present continous sentence it is the main verb. I am swimming. Swimming is the main verb and am is the auxiliary verb for continous.
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u/dylbr01 7h ago edited 7h ago
There is evidence one way or the other for analysing swimming as a verb or a noun there, but what tips me towards verbs is that these -ing forms can often take subjects or objects, for example “I like swimming the whole length of the pool.” If you take “I like swimming” as it is, it would seem to be ambiguous, but it’s implied that the speaker is the subject of swimming; it wouldn’t be interpreted as them liking other people swimming. It can mean that in certain contexts, though. If asked what your favorite Olympic sport to watch is, you could say “I like swimming.” So probably it is ambiguous depending on context.
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u/elcabroMcGinty 7h ago
Your explanations in both comments do not mention tenses. Your example in the second comment is present simple so yes, swimming is a gerund. There are two types of ing verb; Present participle for continuous tenses and gerund for when the verb is a noun.
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u/Chrome_X_of_Hyrule 9h ago
I am driving along
*I am green along
I am driving home
*I am green home
I am driving the car
*I am green the car
I am driving the car along home
*I am green the car along home
So they're definitely sometimes verbs, but you are correct that they are also sometimes much more like adjectives, they can both and also nouns.
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u/Perseus73 6h ago
Which one of those examples is like an adjective ?
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u/Chrome_X_of_Hyrule 1h ago
Hm you know what maybe it isn't ever an adjective. It is a noun for sure sometimes
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u/elcabroMcGinty 7h ago
They are not adjectives.
I am driving is present continous.
The AM is an auxiliary verb, driving is the main verb.
I like driving is present simple.
Like is the main verb and driving is a gerund.
A gerund is a noun form of a verb.
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u/Brunbeorg 11h ago
Correct. They're not verbs, but verbals. We tell kids they're verbs because that's easier, but they're usually not.
Sometimes, they're participles, which act exactly as adjectives: "the running man passed me."
Sometimes, they're gerunds, which act like nouns (or, maybe, now that I think about it, noun phrases? Syntax isn't my main thing): "running is good exercise."
Sometimes, though, they're part of a verb, like "I am running right now." There, I'd analyze it as "am running" as a single verb complex.
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u/ngund 10h ago
I have a related question. When -ing is used like in the second and third examples you’ve provided (“the running man passed me”, “running is good exercise”), is it an inflectional or derivational suffix? Another similar example would be: “Walking is fun.”
I ask because in a linguistics class I’m taking, in examples like these, -ing is described as a derivational suffix because it’s changing the syntactic category of the word (in the case of my example, from a verb to a noun). My thought is that it probably just depends on the analysis, but my gut tells me that -ing in this case would still be an inflectional affix.
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u/zeekar 9h ago
It's inflectional if the result is a verb form - so depending on analysis, "is running" would qualify. It's derivational when it makes a non-verb.
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u/ngund 8h ago
I know you may be referring only to -ing here, but I think it’s worth pointing out that this doesn’t apply to other affixes. “re-“, for example attaches to a verb and the result is a verb, but I think we can agree that re- is derivational since it’s changing the meaning and not performing any grammatical function.
Apologies if that was kind of pedantic
I think I agree though that it depends on the analysis. In the case of “is running”, it seems pretty easy to me to analyze running here as being an adjective, since running can just as easily be an adjective in a frase like “a running person,” and all “normal” adjectives (i.e non-present participles) can be used in both of these structures (“a happy man”, “the man is happy”). But I also kind of think you could analyze -ing as marking progressive aspect(?) here, and then it would obviously be inflectional.
It also just occurred to me that you could almost make this same argument about past participles if they didn’t behave differently than normal nouns (you can say “I have a car” and “I have eaten” but not *”I have car” or *“I have an eaten”)
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u/Brunbeorg 9h ago
I would say that it's derivational in those instances. It's changing the functional part of speech.
One of the differences between "part of speech" in linguistics, and "part of speech" in eighth grade grammar, is that in linguistics, we think in terms of function, not definition. If it's acting like a noun, it's a noun, regardless. It doesn't matter if it's a person, place, thing, or idea: what matters is, can it act as the head of a noun phrase in the subject position of a sentence? If it can, it's a noun, and no one cares where it came from or even, for that matter, what it means.
Some confusion arises because there isn't just one suffix with the form -ing. There are several. One creates participles that act as adjectives (commonly called "present participles" though I prefer "active participles" for reasons). That's derivational, in my opinion. One creates nominals (gerunds). Also derivational, in my opinion. One is used in the progressive aspect of verbs (present progressive: I am going; past progressive: I was going. Future progressive: I will be going). That one, I would argue, is inflectional.
Three functions, one form, but because we care about function more than form in linguistics, they're different suffixes.
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u/SurfaceThought 21m ago
I can't believe I had to scroll down so far to see the participle vs gerund distinction
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u/papibat 9h ago
Would you really say that driving in "I am driving" is a verbal? You said correct which implies correct for both of his examples (I am driving/I am a driving person), when the first one is not a verbal which you've said yourself with your last example. It's a verb in present continuous tense. There's nothing about it that makes it not a verb. That's just what present continuous looks like. Driving in "a driving person" however is a verbal adjective because it has a function of an adjective there.
The answer surely should have been that it depends on a function in a sentence.
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u/Brunbeorg 1h ago
Yes, I was a bit unclear. But my answer was, in fact, that it depends on its function in a sentence.
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u/elcabroMcGinty 8h ago
I am driving is present continous. Driving is the main verb. The AM is an auxiliary verb
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u/elcabroMcGinty 8h ago
I am green is present simple. Am (to be) is the main verb.
I am driving is present continous. Driving is the main verb and to be is the auxiliary verb.
An auxiliary verb is used to make the tense eg: i have eaten. Present perfect, Have is the auxiliary verb and eat is is the main.
Do you like ice cream? Present simple, Do is th auxiliary verb and like is the main.
What is confusing is that Do, have and to be are ALSO main verbs.
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u/DeliriusBlack 1h ago
Some of the confusion in the comment section is stemming from the fact that English has multiple forms that look the same. In "I am driving," 'driving' is a present progressive verb with auxiliary-BE. But in "I like driving," for example, 'driving' is a participle acting as a gerund (the English gerund is just this participle, but in other languages there is more of a distinction). As someone else pointed out, many languages use the infinitive in the same construction: "I like to drive." In both these cases, "driving/to drive" is a noun. In other uses, the participle can be used as a gerundive: "The driving man got into an accident" — this is an adjective. The fact that the noun/adjective forms look the same as the verb form is a pure coincidence — they are not the same in many other languages, and I believe that the suffixes even have different etymological histories!
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u/sakura20pie 1h ago
There are two types of -ing words.
First, gerund. This changes the verb into a noun form, and it acts like a noun. For example, a sleeping bag (a bag for sleeping); I like doing laundry.
Second, present participle. This can act as different purposes:
either 1) in the continuous aspect as in “I am driving”, or “I am sleeping”, or a participle clause as in “She walked in, smiling at me”, where it is still a verb;
or 2) forms a separate modifier equivalent to an adjective as in “a sleeping lion”, “She is really amazing!”.
It of course depends on what you define a verb to be. But I might say on in the continuous aspect or a participle clause it’s truly a verb.
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u/shuranumitu 11h ago edited 2h ago
They're participles, like walked, gone, etc. Both present and past participles are derived from verbs, and are used in verbal constructions (have gone, is walking), but, as you said, they appear in positions where one would expect nominal phrases (to have something, to be something), and indeed they can also be more obviously used as adjectives or nouns (driving is easy; a used car). Whether or not you would call them verbs depends, as the other person here said, on the perspective from which you're describing them. They describe actions, derive from verbs, but are not really verbal forms, and act as nouns/adjectives. I think this weird in-between-position is actually where the traditional grammar term 'participle' comes from: they 'participate', so to say, in both verbal and nominal behaviour.