| Development of the Gerund.
A new verbal appeared in Late ME – the Gerund. The gerund can be traced in 3 sources: the OE verbal noun in -unʒ and inʒ, the Present Participle and the Infinitive. In OE the verbal noun derived from transitive verbs took an object in the Genitive case. The syntactic functions of the verbal noun, the infinitive and the participle partly overlapped. In ME the Present Participle and the verbal noun became identical: they both ended in –ing. This led to the confusion of some of their features: verbal nouns began to take direct objects like participles and infinitives. Some functions of the inflected infinitive were taken by Gerund after its disappearance. The nominal features of the Gerund were its syntactic functions and the ability to be modified by a possessive pronoun or a noun in the Genitive case. In the course of time the sphere of the usage of the Gerund grew: it replaced the Infinitive and the Participle in many adverbial functions, it could be used with various prepositions.
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