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

At 5:30 pm -0500 2/10/98, Carlos Thompson wrote:
......
>>
>Is not the gerund an adverb.  At least in both the English I know and in
>Spanish the gerund acts as an adverb.
In Spanish it is but in English it is a noun, cf.
Smoking is forbidden.  [Subject of 'is']
I liked staying there. [Object of verb 'liked']
That box is for putting waste paper in.  [Governed by the preposition 'for']

The term was first used of similar verbal nouns in Latin.  While the
infinitive could act as either subject or object of a finite verb, it could
not fulfill other functions of nouns, i.e. be used on gen., dat. or
ablative cases or be governed by a preposition.  For that Latin used the
gerund (or more often the grundive if the verb was transitive - but let's
not complicate things), e.g.

piscare est iucundum - to fish/fishing is pleasant [Infin. subject]
piscare amo - I like to fish/fishing   [Infin. object]
ad piscandum abiit - he went off to fish  [Acc. of gerund governed by 'ad']
ars piscandi - the art of fishing   [Gen. of gerund]
piscandi studet - he is devoted to fishing [Dat. of gerund]
piscando tempus triuit - he spend his time [in] fishing.  [Abl. of gerund]

I suppose in the English 'He spent his time fishing', 'fishing' could be
construed as a present participle agreeing with 'him' or as an adverbial
gerund - that's the problem with a language where the two forms have fallen
together!

In western Vulgar Latin as we know the case system broke down so the
genitive & dative came to be expressed by the prepositions 'de' and 'a(d)'
respectively.  Prepositions came to be used before infinitives & this
remains a marked feature of the modern western Romance languages.  However,
the Latin gerund not merely hung on in the ablative case, but came more and
more to be used _adverbially_ where Classical Latin would have used the
present participle (Cf. the last example above).  This usage has survived
to the present day in Italian, Spanish & Italian.

In French, through phonetic attrition, the Latin present participle & the
gerund have fallen together as they have in English, so things are a little
different there ;)

> The present or active participe, by
>other way, is an adjective.  In English there is no morfological difference
>between the active participe and the gerund (the -ing form).
Exactly  :)

>
>If gerund is an adverb, then walkingly is the adverbation of an adverb.
>
>... hmmmm...
Hmmm indeed.  The English gerund is essentially a noun.  Adverbs in -ly are
normally derived from adjectives. The unidiomatic 'walkingly' must be
derived from the present participle 'walking', but certainly it'd function
as the ablative of the Latin gerund or as the Spanish gerund.

Ray.