0 (in English) a noun formed by adding –ing to a verb, for example ‘swimming ‘ in ‘Swimming is her main hobby’. -- động danh từ
While purely indefinite examples are hard to come by, verbal gerunds do participate in the ambiguity patterns also found for bare nominal gerunds.
Purely indefinite readings appear to be more exceptional, yet in some contexts they provide a plausible interpretation of a given gerund construction.
In view of this, we could expect the subject gerunds to be the first to acquire the verbal traits characteristic of the participle.
As pointed out above, more than the other two gerund types, definite nominal gerunds tend to co-occur with prepositions other than the most frequent six.
A certain degree of functional differentiation is also apparent in combinations of definite nominal gerunds with the prepositions of, by and in.
More marginally, definite nominal gerunds can also be used to specify a (typically undesirable) result, which is then presented as an accessible fact.
In such uses, definite nominal gerunds draw on accessible knowledge on the part of the speaker for the identification of the event they refer to.
A few final words are in place concerning combinations of definite nominal gerunds with to.
