How do gerunds conceptualize events? A diachronic study
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12197149 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lauren Fonteyn (0000-0001-5706-8418, 2University of Leuven, Belgium & Research Foundation Flanders, Belgium), Liesbet Heyvaert (0000-0003-3515-5451, 1University of Leuven, Belgium), Charlotte Maekelberghe (0000-0002-2743-5480, 1University of Leuven, Belgium, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 583-612 |
| Publication date | 2015-10-26 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Cognitive Linguistics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0936-5907 • E-ISSN: 1613-3641 |
| Publisher | De Gruyter Mouton (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1515/cog-2015-0061 |
| OpenAlex | W2216766759 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 7 |
| References cited | 18 |
This article offers a cognitive perspective on the evolution of the semantics of English nominal gerunds (NG) (I regret the signing of the contract ) and verbal gerunds (VG) (I regret signing the contract ). While the formal differences between NGs and VGs are well documented, their semantics remains largely unexplored territory. The perspective that is taken here is centered on the linguistic notion of reference and various aspects of the conceptualization involved in it. As they formally hover between more nominal and more clause-like internal properties, gerunds form an interesting test case for the cognitive perspective on referentiality. Our corpus analysis describes how the situations that NGs and VGs refer to are conceptualized as deictic expressions grounded in the speech event in Present-day English, and how this has changed since the Early Modern period. It is shown that only a multi-layered model of referentiality can account for the subtle differences found between NGs and VGs: while no fundamental shifts are found with regard to the traditional referential subtypes (specific, non-specific, generic), NGs and VGs do turn out to differ in their choice for either nominal or clausal grounding mechanisms, in their status as existentially stable or flexible entities and in the mental spaces in which they situate the events that they conceptualize
Cognition · Cognitive linguistics · Cognitive psychology · Cognitive semantics · Conceptualization · Gerund · Linguistics · Noun · Perspective (graphical · Regret · Computer Science · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Philosophy · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation · Artificial Intelligence
From nominal to verbal gerunds
Competing motivations in the diachronic nominalization of English gerunds
Towards a system of principles for identifying nominalizing metaphors
Categorial shift
From The Daily Show to Last Week Tonight
Typologizing nominal expressions
Nominal and verbal gerunds in present-day English
The iconicity of the universal categories “noun” and “verb”
Specificity and Definiteness in Sentence and Discourse Structure
The Origins of the English Gerund
Serving two masters
From nominal to verbal gerunds
The Development of Gerunds as Objects of Subject-Control Verbs in English (1400-1760)
On reanalysis and actualization in syntactic change
The Gerund in Early Modern English
Nominal gerunds in 16th-century English. The function of the definite article
Reference and Definite Descriptions
Deriving object-verb order in late Middle English
Indefinite Nominal Gerunds, or the Particularization of a Reified Event
The gerund in middle English
| Citations per year | 0.7 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2016 - 2024 (9) |
| Highly cited | No |