Re: Settle a Bet

>On Sun, 24 Feb 2002 20:33:14 -0500 Christopher B Wright
><faceloran@...> writes:
>>  Question: is "eat" in "she is eating" transitive or intransitive?
>>  [snip]
>>  Well, actually, in that example, it's a participle. Noun forms, even of
>>  verbs, don't have transitivity (transitiveness?), so it's not
>transitive
>>  in another way.
>
>A couple of people said something like this, and I feel like I should
>contradict.  From a hyper-traditional grammar this may be true--nouns
>don't have transitivity, so neither does a gerund like "eating."  But
>that's absurd--"eating" in "She is eating" doesn't function like a noun,

I always saw the "is <gerund>" construction in English as a
"continuative tense", myself.


>I argue that even in a sentence like "Eating makes me fat," the word
>"eating" is a verb.  That's because you can freely add an object: "Eating
"Eating makes me fat." == "The act of eating makes me fat."  "Eating"
is the name of a specific type of activity.  "Eating X makes me fat."
may very well be a different grammatical form, even if the
orthographic and spoken forms might be identical.  They certainly
fulfill different functions.


--