영어 동명사의 기원과 통시적 변화

The Origin and Diachronic Changes of the English Gerund

While the gerund is a very productive verbal system in Present-day English, it was not in Old English. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the earlier history of the form V-ing to understand when, how, and why the V-ing became a verbal gerund. The analysis of data reveals that the reanalysis from nominal to verbal gerund occurred during the Middle English period. As regards the cause of the change, this paper argues that the loss of case ending, particularly that of the genitive plural with an objective meaning, and the fixation of the word order are the main factor, while the previously proposed factors also contributed to a certain extent, such as the surface confusion of V-ing between gerund and present participle, the structural ambiguity between nominal and verbal gerund, and the necessity for a new verbal category to be used following prepositions.