3. Objective complement; as, “If a child finds itself in want of anything it runs in and asks its father for it—does it call that doing its father a service?”—Ruskin. Here the gerund phrase helps to complete the verb does call and at the same time is an attribute of the direct object that.
4. Subjective complement; as, “The first of all English games is making money.”—Ruskin.
5. Appositive modifier; as, “I recommend this most faithful form of reading—learning by heart.”
6. Object of a preposition; as, “Nelson attributed all his success in life to having been a quarter of an hour before his time.” This is the commonest use of the gerund, for while the root infinitive may be used after very few prepositions, the gerund may be used after many.
7. Objective adverbial.—The adjective worth is usually followed by a noun that expresses a measure of value, answering the question worth how much? or worth what? It may be followed by a gerund answering the same question; as, “That is worth paying for.”—Warner.
II. The gerund used adjectively.—We find the gerund used adjectively in such expressions as sleeping-car, mourning-robes, dining-table, eating-apples. These gerunds seem at first like the participles in such expressions as singing-bird, shooting-star, barking-dog; but they are not like participles in meaning, as can be proved by changing them to equivalent elements of other kinds. A singing-bird is a bird that sings, but a sleeping-car is not a car that sleeps; it is a car for sleeping in.
Peculiar Constructions.—It cannot always be settled to one’s entire satisfaction whether a certain element is a participle or a gerund. In order to decide one must know just how a certain expression came to be, that is, of what earlier and older form it is a development. Sometimes it seems impossible to ascertain this. For instance, take the sentence, “Nanny has been busy ironing this evening.”—George Eliot. Is ironing a participle, and does the order of words in this sentence arise from a transposition of the sentence,—“Nanny, ironing, has been busy this evening”? Or is ironing a gerund, and is this sentence a parallel construction with, “Nanny has been busy at her ironing this evening”? Either interpretation of the sentence is a sensible one.
Another puzzling instance is found in the sentence,—“He was two weeks learning to use his flippers.”—Kipling. Is learning a part of the progressive verb-phrase was learning, and does the sentence mean, “He was learning to use his flippers during two weeks”? Or is learning a gerund, object of at understood, that is, is the sentence a parallel construction with this,—“You were a long time at it”? One cannot pronounce with certainty on this point, but must choose the construction that seems to him most reasonable.
Exercise 26
Dispose of all gerunds or gerund-phrases in the following sentences.