This section deals with gerunds as -ing
forms that have partially retained verbal features (unlike action
nominals)). The Penn Treebank tags them as VBG and
discriminates them from nouns (NN). In the
tectogrammatical representation they have verbal t-lemmas. Besides
following the original PTB tagging, the annotators can identify a gerund
with the following criteria:
With transitive verbs it does not employ the preposition of to express object. In verbs that require prepositional objects (e.g. to dispose of, to look forward to etc.) the decision gerundial clause vs. action nominal is up to the annotator. Preferably they are captured as gerundial clauses.
It is not modified by adjectives.
It combines with adverbials.
It accepts auxiliaries.
It is (on the tectogrammatical layer) always preceded by subject
in a possessive or common-case form. Gerunds with missing subject get
the relevant inner participant (mostly ACT) completed with t-lemma
substitutes #Cor or #Gen.
Typical examples:
His leaving no address was most inconvenient.
I count on his parents forbidding it.
You may depend on my not mentioning it.
Mother always insisted on us having a party at Christmas.
The similar -ing form that is not to be mixed up with gerund is the action nominals. They are usually lemmatized as nouns, and they act as such. At the current annotation stage we do not even complete their valency frames with generated nodes. This section is exclusively dedicated to gerunds.