Talk:Verbal noun

Old Talk

(Explanation request)

Wow. Written like a true English teacher.
Now can we get an article that actually explains what a "verbal noun" is (and what it is not)? ;-)
- Liberty 05:08, 15 September 2005 (UTC)

• Did this stimulate any change to the article? What does the wink mean? Making a mere joke out of

and what it is not

or of

Now can we get an article that actually explains what a "verbal noun" is (and what it is not)?

Disclaiming responsibility (as if it were funny) for the snottiness of

Wow. Written like a true English teacher.

Perhaps the whole contrib should be struck thru.
--Jerzy•t 07:57, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

(Possible change of topic)

It is unclear whether the non-signing IP intended to start a new topic, or protest the view that the material existing in September explained deficiently, or to opine that what existed the next February did explain adequately. Thus it is unclear as well whether "Old Talk" really consists of two topics and appropriate sections, or just one of each.^{Jerzy•t 07:57, 13 April 2010 (UTC)}

It is really difficult to me to understand the reason why nobody knows that the so called "verbal noun" is, actually, only a verb under certain circumstances. A verb which is not in a predicate location, and which has lost certain valences, and time markers.
—Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.58.10.235 (talk) 15:42, 2 February 2006

• Only a verb under certain circumstances?
  Puh, I doubt it! In certain european languages, perhaps. If you take Georgian, for example, what has been agreed to call "mazdar" is actually a noun (in the sense that you can DECLINE it, as opposed to verbs under circumstances!) working roughly the way our infinitive does. It's really a phenomenon in its own right, so I see no point in explaining it away. Does it take us anywhere?
  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.190.164.119 (talk) 20:40, 9 December 2007 (UTC)
  • The reference to "mazdar" would be opaque but for the article's current ref to the Arabic word "masdar", which seems to embrace, in grammatic contexts, all of "verbal noun, infinitive, gerund", not to mention "absolute object" -- which WP (and wikt) do not cover, but apparently "can be added to every verb to strengthen or more nearly define the verbal idea." ... as if that helped.
    --Jerzy•t 07:57, 13 April 2010 (UTC)
    
• I'm amused that the 1st IP above in this section commented on this grammar topic with one sentence, followed by a phrase beginning with a capital and ending with period, which is not a sentence. Presumably it means that

  "[A verbal noun is a verb only if it] is not in a predicate location, and which has lost certain valences, and time markers."

But neither it, nor the previous response to it, deserves much attention in the absence of the citation of a reliable source in place of the level of attitude that both contributors seem to expect to be convincing. They're no more authoritative than i am!
--Jerzy•t 07:57, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Excessive vagueness

I removed the example beginning

* Speaking means that one is not listening.

I think its point is to distinguish participles from gerunds, but the meaning of the example is left unclear: "listening" is called out as are all the instances of verbal nouns, with nothing but whatever chaotic mental checklist the user has derived from

especially ... gerunds, and sometimes infinitives and supines (full infinitives or to-infinitives)

to help one see what relevance the distinction between "thinking" as gerund and as participle has. The point may be worth making, but not in the list of examples.
Similarly, i have removed

(the Arabic masdar is a verbal noun: naql, for example, can be translated as "transporting" or "to transport", but its literal meaning is "transportation".)

despite my belief it can be fixed by a careful specialist; the 5 years it has stood unchanged do nothing to sanctify it, but rather expose and condemn it as obviously too little examined for the ... parenthesis splice, i guess, and the hiding of the sentence's period inside a parenthetical expression, to have been corrected. Its conceptual incoherence counsels against trying to just fix the grammar:

_ _ "[M]asdar is a verbal noun" means that the Arabic term "masdar" denotes a linguistic concept paralleling of the English "verbal noun", so it turns out we don't care whether "masdar" is an example of an Arabic verbal noun.
_ _ When i am told that Handschuh literally means "hand-shoe" in German but should be translated as "glove", i understand why the literal translation is not the correct translation; what kind of mismatch am i supposed to construe, and what sense of "literal" to infer, when told that "transportation" literally translates naql but "transporting" and "to transport" -- exact substitutes for "transportation" in some contexts -- do not? (I would never say, conversely, that "Handschuh" is is not a literal translation of "glove", since "glove" is not recognizable by typical native speakers of English as a metaphor. I hope this is not some kind of quibble relating to the metaphor "carry across" being visible (as "across-carry") in "trans[-]port" but not in naql.)
--Jerzy•t 07:57, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

• However,

1. Arabic grammar#Verbal noun (maṣdar) may help in some way, and
2. If it can be restored in a clear fashion, thf section should be lk'd from the use of the word.

--Jerzy•t 08:12, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Lead section

I altered it, subtracting the material i've struck thru here, and adding the bold:

A verbal noun is a noun formed derived directly as an inflexion a grammatical form of a verb or a verb stem, sharing at least in part its constructions.

The article inflection says verb inflections are conjugations, but this is about their non-finite forms; that fix left "form[ed]" repeated in a confusing faction.
Also, as my tag notes in more detail, "constructions" is problematically ambiguous.
--Jerzy•t 07:57, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Verbal

Should this article be merged with verbal? FilipeS 17:20, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

Too restricted

This article should either be restricted to English for otherwise it is completely incorrect. To be a verbal noun doesn't depend on a grammatical construction but on a semantic distinction. Each noun that can have a subject (the art of cooking) or an object (the love for her, the production of eggs) can semantically be called a verbal noun. To my knowledge only sites on English grammar restrict the term to the gerund and its kin. Dirk math (talk) 16:01, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

Copy editing needed

The entire article is problematic, but I've tagged the Types section because the opening sentence is quite unidiomatic in places, for example this run-on sentence with grammar errors:

As suggested by some traditional grammarians, but modern grammarians do not include them in verbal noun, verbal nouns may be non-finite verb forms which follow verb, for example by taking appropriate objects (though usually not a subject) and being modified by adverbs, to produce a verb phrase which is then used within a larger sentence as a noun phrase. Matuko (talk) 23:16, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

I've removed the c/e template; this article is poorly referenced (only one ref) and probably contains original research so a c/e would be a waste of time and effort for the copy-editor. The "‎Specification of the agent" section was completely unreffed so I've removed it and tagged the remaining text more appropriately. Please fix referencing and other problems before requesting copy-edit. Cheers, Baffle☿gab 02:59, 8 July 2020 (UTC)

Nouning verbally

This article seems poured from a blender that entails a concoction of hybridized linguistic terms. Originally, verbal noun was coined in 1652 - perhaps by someone who didn't know that gerund had already been in use from 1513 in an era when books on linguistics were rare, news traveled slowly, and Al Gore hadn't yet invented the internet.
Problems with this article:

• "A verbal noun ... has no verbal force." Whatever that means.
• "I warned him against fast driving" (this is a noun formed from the verb drive). Isn't "driving" a gerund, or am I missing something?
• "Verbal noun has often been treated as a synonym for gerund." I hear an echo.
• "Some grammarians use the term verbal noun to mean verbal noun, gerund and noun infinitive." Which grammarians? And I need help to understand what "noun infinitive" means. (I lie: I get what it's supposed to mean, but there's no basis for that term in common usage or linguistic parlance.)
  

My main complaint with this article stems from the lack of any definition ascribed to verbal noun as a linguistic term of art. Absent a definition, the term could be construed to apply to a nonfinite verb that has a so-called verbal force, e.g. "A budget helps (to) organize financial resources" wherein "(to) organize" represents:

1. a nonfinite verb that is transitive and, presumably, not without verbal force.
2. the nominal object of the transitive verb, "helps."

In my lexicon, "organize" could occur under any of the five meanings given under the nominal verb entry, ( e.g. organize, as an infinitive verb that functions as the object of an antecedent transitive verb in a sentence such as "I need to organize my thoughts" or as a causative object complement: "I had him organize my files"). I suppose I could have called my lexical entry a verbal noun rather than a nominal verb, but then people might read the Wikipedia article on Verbal noun and need their brains unscrambled.
I'm just sayin'. --Kent Dominic·(talk) 01:40, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

Puzzling terminology

The article claims to cover "gerundial nouns", but to exclude gerunds. All the examples given of "gerundial nouns" are gerunds. Meanwhile, gerunds are again referred to as a different type of word that can also be used as a noun. The linked article on gerunds clearly covers the same sort of "gerundial nouns". What do the writers mean by "gerund" in this article? 24.237.159.157 (talk) 05:09, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

This article was ridiculously in need of revision, which I've just tended to. Kent Dominic·(talk) 16:17, 18 September 2023 (UTC)