Ing clauses in spoken English: structure, usage and recent change

UCL Historically, the English gerund is an action noun which, from the Middle English period onwards, could gradually also be used as a verb (Jack 1988, Fanego 1996a/b, 1998, 2004). In Present-Day English the reflexes of this development are, on the one hand, verbal nouns heading noun phrases, as in [The deliberate sinking of the ship] was a criminal act, and, on the other hand, verbs heading clausal structures, as in [The navy deliberately sinking the ship] was a criminal act. The heads of these bracketed constructions are called gerunds in many grammars, despite the differences between them, e.g. the fact that in the second example sinking licenses a subject and an object. In this paper we study the distribution of the second type of structure in PDE – which we call –ing clauses – taking into account the dependents the verb takes, the functions that the clause as a whole can perform, and how their use and frequency has changed over recent decades. We use the data we obtain to contribute to the question of whether the label 'gerund' still has a role to play in the grammar of English. Our findings show that over the time period 1960–1990, –ing clauses functioning as direct object and as adverbial increasingly tend to contain an explicit subject. We argue that this suggests that –ing clauses have tended to become more clausal over time in spoken British English. We use the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day English (DCPSE) as our dataset.