Gerund in existential clauses denotes the actual event that is taking place. In fact, the predicate to be merely adds the tense and mode information and potentially negation. Negated sentences usually acquire the modal meaning of impossibility in addition (There was no stopping him. = It was impossible to stop him.).

Using existential clauses with gerunds allows for underspecification of inner participants, and it possibly affects topic-focus articulation. As the gerundial form in this case can have objects introduced by the preposition of in verbs that normally take direct objects and manner adverbials are expressed by adjectives (and not with adverbs) we regard it as a deverbal noun, which implies that it is lemmatized as noun and missing inner participants of the corresponding verb are not inserted. It gets, though, the whole range of "verbal" functors according to the meaning of the given modifications.

Seemingly, it could be easily paraphrased with an ordinary passive sentence. However, we have decided to keep the existential clause in the tectogrammatical representation anyway:

Examples:

Figure 8.44. Gerund in existential constructions

There will be singing.

Figure 8.45. Gerund in existential constructions

There was no stopping him.

The negative modal meaning is to be indicated in the grammateme deontmod (which acquires the value [deontmod=poss]and [negation=neg1]) in the main predicate. The gerund will get its relevant valency frame.

The reason for preserving the existential structure in the tectogrammatical representation is that these gerunds also occur in coordination with concrete nouns:

Because of the concrete noun refreshments the existential structure would have to be artificially inserted anyway.

When the gerund governs a prepositional ACT (introduced by the preposition of) or a REG (introduced by the preposition in), it is also represented as the usual existential sentence.

Yet sentences where the ACT of the gerund is expressed by direct case, e.g.

have the gerund as main predicate and There and be are associated to the gerund's node as auxrf's. The verb to be is regarded as the progressive tense auxiliary.

Figure 8.46. Gerund in existential constructions

There will be people dancing.