Verbals -- Advanced Questions
Pre-positioned
Gerundives
A pre-positioned gerundive is
simply a "gerundive" that appears almost immediately before the word it
modifies, as in "the tired old man." Many developmental linguists claim
that pre-school children use gerundives, but I suspect that they are looking
at these pre-positioned items. (It's usually difficult to tell what they
mean because they usually give no examples.) The KISS Approach does not
consider these words as true gerundives for two related reasons, both of
which are related to the question of natural language development.
Within KISS theory, a true gerundive
is a reduction of a subordinate clause. Language development appears to
begin with simple S/V/C patterns:
The old man was still working.
He was tired.
It then progresses into subordinate clauses:
The old man, who was tired,
was still working.
And later we learn to reduce the subordinate clause to a
gerundive:
The tired old man was still
working.
Theoretically, in other words, it is possible that these
words are true gerundives. But it is just as possible that children add
these words to their vocabulary in the same way that they add regular adjectives:
The sleepy old man was still
working.
If this is the case, then words such as "tired" should not
be considered as gerundives because they do not reflect the advanced syntactic
development of the gerundive.
That they are not, in fact,
gerundives in the KISS sense is suggested by their general lack of phrasal
modifiers. In
The very tired old man was
still working.
KISS would consider "tired" as a regular adjective, but in
The old man, tired from a full
day
in the field, was still working.
"tired" is out of the normal adjectival "pre-position" and
is itself more heavily modified. Hence it functions as a gerundive.
This question, of course, needs
more research, and you can decide for yourself whether or not you want
to consider these words as gerundives.
"For"
plus an infinitive
If you analyze enough sentences, you will run
into a sentence such as:
For Bill to go to New York
is a bad idea.
Infinitives that have subjects apparently can't simply function as subjects:
they require the preposition "for." There are at least two ways to explain
this construction. One is to say that the infinitive is the object of the
preposition, that "Bill" is the subject of the infinitive, and that the
prepositional phrase functions as a noun, the subject of the sentence.
(By the time you get to infinitives, you will have already detected the
pedagogical lie about "all" prepositional phrases functioning as adjectives
or adverbs: you have probably seen a few as indirect objects.) The
other approach is to say that the infinitive ("to go") is the subject of
the sentence, and the prepositional phrase, in this case, "For Bill," functions
as an adverb either to the infinitive or to the main verb (in this case,
"is").
(It is very important not to get hung
up on this complication. Linguists won't like my explanation, but most
students accept it; the construction is rare; no one ever never makes a
mistake in using it, and you need to understand the most common cases first:
if one infinitive in 500 appears in a prepositional phrase with "for,"
worry about it only after you can explain the 499 that don't.) |