Re: USAGE: "Laughingly":What part of speech is it?

Orjan Johansen wrote:

> > Though note that a progressive verb is synthetically an auxiliary
> > verbplus a present participle.
>
> I seem to have read somewhere that it actually descends from a gerundiv=
e,
> however - it used to be "I am at laughing", which became "I am
> a-laughing", and then it was reanalyzed as a participle, and the "a-"
> dropped/deprecated.
I haven't read that, but I wouldn't be surprised.  I  believe I read some=
where
(was it this group?) though that OE had precisely the same construction w=
ith
the present participle (-end), so (if I remember the OE correctly, and so
please forgive any errors): "I was fighting" was sometimes something like
"ic w=E6s feohtende".

So, I see several possibilities:

(1) the form comes originally from the gerundive as you said
(2) it comes from the -end form of OE and when that ending
was lost, it immediately was added again with the new one,
-ing.
(3) it was lost in the old one, and was later redeveloped
again on its own when the -ing form was the participle
(and gerundive) ending.



=0D