In English, there are a lot of constructions making use of the morpheme -
ing, e.g., “gerunds”, present participial constructions, and “gerundive relatives”. This paper tries to present a comprehensive analysis of these NP-
ing constructions. Our claim is that -
ing has unspecified feature value, which apparently gives rise to two distinct -
ings: nominal -
ing and INFL -
ing. On the basis of this distinction, it will be shown that there are theoretically five subtypes of NP-
ing constructions. Our analysis is a superior one, not only for its coverage of data, but in that it relies on no ad hoc stipulations concerning the principles in UG, but reduces the peculiarities of NP-
ing constructions to the lexical idiosyncrasies of -
ing.
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