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

Tom Wier wrote:

> Robin Turner wrote:
>
> > I once started writing an article call "Taming the Wild Gerund" but gave up on
> > it, as the gerund proved to be too wild to be tamed.  A gerund certainly isn't
> > an adverb, otherwise there wouldn't be a film called "The Shining".  In
> > English, at any rate, adding -ing just seems to make it a rather vague part of
> > speech whose behaviour depends on syntactic and semantic context e.g.
>
> Well, if you look at it, that just makes it a noun, right? I mean, if it serves
> nosyntactic function, then it could only serve to change the part of speech :
> the gerund nominalizes the verb, a deverbitive noun (yes, that term is actually
> used in the literature).
>
> > They objected to my laughing - verb-like noun
> > I am laughing - adjective-like verb
>
> This is not a gerund -- this is the present participle being used as partof the
> progressive aspect verb formation.
>
> > A laughing hyena - verb-like adjective-like compound noun ?!
>
> Again, the present participle.
>
Well, it was the -ing morpheme I was referring to, not just gerunds.  I actually
don't think terms such as "gerund" (still less, "gerundive"!) are of much use in
describing English grammar.  Similarly the term "present participle" is pretty
inappropriate, given that it has nothing to do with presentness.   -ing forms do
seem to have some kind of family resemblance, though.  Semantically there is not a
great deal of difference between "This film is boring" (adjective) and "This film is
boring me" (present progressive).  In predicate logic (and Lojban) they would be the
same, except that in the first example the second place of the predicate is elided.
On the other hand, "true" gerunds, like "The Shining" are somewhat different, being
a kind of abstraction of an event, rather than a slice of an event (progressive) or
a property derived from an event (adjectival use).

As I said, the nice thing about conlangs is that you don't have to worry about all
this; you just need to decide which forms of thing/event abstractions you want, and
build them into your grammar.  To take Lojban, and The Shining, as examples again:

le gusni     -    the light/"shiner"
le nu gusni    -    the event of light / the shining
le ka gusni    -    the property of shining (luminosity?)
le solri ca gusni - the sun now shines / the sun is shining
le gusni solri - the shining sun (as opposed to a dark star?)

Lojban is an isolating language, but you could do the same sort of thing with
affixes if you wanted.


Robin Turner