Verbal gerunds in English: a case study in natural language ontology and referentiality
This thesis investigates the two verbal gerunds in English: POSS-ing (Clay’s winning the game) and ACC-ing (Clay winning the game). It is widely recognized that they do not denote events, but there are many different proposals about their ontological status. This thesis answers two questions: what o...
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| Tipo de recurso: | tesis doctoral |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2024 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | CBUC, CESCA |
| Repositorio: | TDR. Tesis Doctorales en Red |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:www.tdx.cat:10803/691814 |
| Acceso en línea: | http://hdl.handle.net/10803/691814 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Verbal gerunds in english Gerundis verbals de l’anglés Gerundios verbales del inglés 81 |
| Sumario: | This thesis investigates the two verbal gerunds in English: POSS-ing (Clay’s winning the game) and ACC-ing (Clay winning the game). It is widely recognized that they do not denote events, but there are many different proposals about their ontological status. This thesis answers two questions: what ontological objects do verbal gerunds denote, and how do POSS-ing and ACC-ing differ in their meanings? Following the methodology of natural langauge ontology, I observe the distribution and discourse functions of POSS-ing and ACC-ing using corpus data. My data reveal two important phenomena. One is the asymmetry between POSSing and ACC-ing as complement of with and without, which eventually leads to the claim that POSS-ing is referential and ACC-ing is not. The other is the use of POSS-ing after temporal prepositions, which points to POSS-ing having a temporal location, leading to the analysis of POSS-ing as a Kimian state, an abstract object with temporal properties. ACC-ing is analyzed as event kind descriptions. |
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