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The English Gerund-Participle in Cognitive Grammar
Patrick J. Duffley
Université Laval
The term ‘gerund-participle’ used in the title of this paper is adopted from Huddleston and Pullum (2002:80), who see no reason to give priority to one or the other of the
traditional terms used to refer to the verbal uses of the English -ing form illustrated in (1):
(1) a.He was expelled for killing the birds.
b.They are entertaining the Prime Minister.
The meaning of this form is generally defined as ‘imperfective’ (Hirtle 1975:20–21, Freed
1979:72–73), ‘durative’ (Kruisinga 1931:259) or ‘ongoing’ (Dixon 1984:588–89, 1995:185;
Hewson & Bubenik 1997:5–6), whence the term ‘progressive’. This view of the gerundparticiple’s meaning has gone virtually unquestioned over the past fifty years of linguistic
research on English.
In more recent times, cognitive grammar has brought a new approach to the field, applying the tools of cognitive psychology to the study of human language. The goal of this
paper will be to evaluate whether any progress has been achieved by the application of
these analytical instruments to the English gerund-participle. This will allow certain more
general considerations to be made about the methodology underlying the cognitive grammar approach.
The fundamental concepts used by cognitive grammar to describe the meaning of the
gerund-participle are those of ‘scanning’ and ‘scope of predication’. As it applies to temporal entities, scanning refers to the mental processing of an event. Two modes of cognitive
processing can be distinguished in this domain. Sequential scanning involves ‘following a
situation state by state as it evolves through conceived time’ (Langacker 1991b:80). This produces a dynamic representation of an event which reflects the successive transformations
deriving each state from its predecessor. Summary scanning is a more complex operation
and involves building up a complete image of an event by accumulating images of all of the
instants actualized at each moment of the event’s development (Langacker 1991b:79–80).
This is comparable to forming a still photograph through multiple exposures (Langacker
1987:73). Applied to the example of a ball falling to the ground, the diagrams in Figure 1
(overleaf ) represent sequential (part 1) and summary (part 2) scanning.
In the grammatical domain, verbs are claimed to be distinguished from such classes as
adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, infinitives and participles ‘in virtue of designating a process as opposed to an atemporal relation’ (Langacker 1991a:5) A process is characterized
as a relationship followed sequentially in its evolution through conceived time, whereas
an atemporal relation, in the case of infinitives and participles, involves suspending the
Patrick J. Duffley
302
a
b
Part 1
c
d
a–d
Part 2
Figure 1. Sequential (Part 1) and summary (Part 2) scanning of a ball falling to the ground.
sequential scanning of the verb stem, i.e. summary rather than sequential scanning (Langacker 1991b:82). This allows the -ing form to serve as a noun modifier and bars it from
being the head of a finite clause (ibid:91).
Several questions arise at this point. The first is whether summary scanning provides an
adequate description of the meaning of English non-finite forms. For instance, from the
point of view of the event itself denoted by the -ing form, the way in which the situation is
presented seems clearly sequential in some uses:
(2) The woman strolling down the beach is my mother.
(3) I found my little brother tearing my photo album to pieces in my bedroom.
A second question concerns the connection claimed to exist between summary scanning
and the capacity of fulfilling a noun modifier function. If, as claimed by the theory, the bare
infinitive involves the suspension of sequential scanning and the attendant conversion of
the processual predication of the stem into an atemporal relation, one wonders why this
non-finite form cannot modify a noun:
(4) *The person see is Joe.
(5) *The only person be named was Theresa.
Thirdly, the application of summary scanning, as one would expect, is claimed to impose
a ‘holistic perspective’ on the process designated by the verb stem (Langacker 2000:10).
This does not square very well with the use of the -ing form in the progressive construction,
where it always evokes the event as somehow incomplete.
Indeed, Langacker bases his description of what is specific to the semantic content of
the ‑ing morpheme on the impression produced by the gerund-participle in the progressive construction, characterizing it as imposing ‘a restricted immediate scope of predication comprising an arbitrary sequence of internal states (i.e. the initial and final states are
excluded)’ (1991b:91–92). Verspoor (1996:437–38) elaborates this in terms of perceptual
scope, proposing that the schematic value of the -ing form is to symbolize ‘an imperfective atemporal relation viewed from an internal perspective… the conceptualizer (speaker/
The English Gerund-Participle in Cognitive Grammar
303
Perceptual Scope
Event
C
Time
Figure 2. Imperfective atemporal relation viewed from the conceptualizer’s perspective.
viewer) construes an event as seen from very close-by so that his perceptual field includes
an event in progress, but the boundaries of the event… are not within his perceptual scope’.
This is diagrammed as in Figure 2.
The -ing morpheme is thus used to ‘imperfectivize the perfective process designated by
the verb stem it combines with’ (Langacker 2000:226–27), construing it as unbounded
within the immediate temporal scope. Hamawand (2002:65) adopts basically the same
definition: ‘The ing participle designates an imperfective simple atemporal relation, which
excludes its initial and final states’.
The definition of the -ing form’s semantic content just described is applied only to the
participial uses of the -ing (noun-like uses are accounted for by a nominalization process
which is discussed below). Verifying the definition against usage reveals, however, that
there are a number of uses where it does not correspond to the data. One case is raised by
Langacker himself (1991a:210) in relation to the attributive modifier use of the -ing form
found in (6) and (7):
(6) anyone knowing his whereabouts
(7) people still believing that the earth is flat
Here the verb stem is imperfective (in Langacker’s sense of ‘stative’) and so the role of the
‑ing cannot be that of imperfectivizing a perfective process (i.e. stativizing an action). Langacker proposes therefore that the role of the -ing morpheme here is simply to atemporalize
the verb stem so that it can be used as a noun modifier. However, since atemporality is a
characteristic shared by all non-finite verbal forms, one may ask why the infinitive and the
past participle would not do the job just as well as the -ing form for this purpose. Moreover,
the fact that the -ing form is not semantically equivalent to the past participle in noun
modifier function shows that there is more to its meaning here than the mere notion of
atemporality:
(8) a.a charging battery
b.a charged battery
304
Patrick J. Duffley
In addition the definition of the -ing’s meaning excludes the initial and final segments of
the event. Counterexamples for this claim can be found in appositive function. In this type
of construction, one observes not only stative events, such as (9), but also complete actions,
as in (10):
(9) Being a good friend of the family, John received an invitation to the party.
(10) Knocking twice, she opened the door and entered the apartment.
To claim in the latter case that the initial and final segments of the knocking are not evoked
flies in the face of the message conveyed by this sentence.
When nominal uses of the type illustrated in (11) below are treated, Langacker’s cognitive grammar analysis shifts from the word-level to that of the clause:
(11) Zelda’s reluctantly signing the contract
Such ‘factive nominalizations’ are held to apply to a higher-level structure: reluctantly signing the contract is characterized as a ‘processual expression that has all the ingredients of a
finite clause except an explicit subject and a grounding predication (i.e. tense or a modal)’
(Langacker 1991a:32). Since this clause-like higher-level structure is processual, it involves
sequential scanning and can consequently evoke a perfective event, as in (12):
(12) Sam’s washing the windows was a shock to everybody,
where one understands that Sam performed the complete action of washing the windows.
The problem with this is that the participial uses of the -ing form are also clause-like, as
they also allow adverbial modification, direct objects and perfect constructions:
(13) A man laboriously dragging a heavy object came into view.
(14) Having signed the contract, Zelda could now turn her mind to other matters.
This should mean however that the -ing is processual here, which is in direct contradiction
with the definition of the -ing participle as involving summary rather than sequential scanning. Indeed, we have noted uses such as (2) and (3) where the -ing form denotes events in
progress which are followed sequentially as they evolve through time.
What can be concluded from these observations? First of all, that the concepts of summary and sequential scanning are tangential to the distinction between finite and nonfinite verb forms in English: the existence of non-finite forms which are clearly processual
shows that scanning cannot be the basis of the traditional distinction between conjugated
and non-conjugated verb forms. Secondly, that Langacker’s approach confuses word and
clause levels in its analysis of the English -ing form: if the -ing is the sign of a clause-level
nominalization in uses like (11) and (12), why does this ending attach to the verb stem
rather than to the higher-level clause-like structure which it is claimed to nominalize? A
third conclusion which must be drawn is that the cognitive analysis of the -ing’s semantic
The English Gerund-Participle in Cognitive Grammar
305
content has been unable to go beyond the traditional definition of the gerund-participle as
denoting progressive aspectuality. Although this is perhaps the most frequent impression
associated with the gerund-participle, there are many cases where it does not apply.
On a deeper level, one might ponder over the reasons why progress has not been
achieved on the definition of the semantic content of the English gerund-participle by the
application of the analytical principles of cognitive grammar. Notions such as summary vs.
sequential scanning and immediate scope, used as explanatory tools by this theory, have
been borrowed from cognitive psychology, where they were developed from research on
human perception. Their applicability to human language cannot, however, be taken for
granted. A properly linguistic methodology should involve a careful observation of the
linguistic items which constitute one’s object of study. This means starting with the linguistic sign as the basis for defining linguistic categories, not with notions developed in
other fields which make no reference to this sign. Another example of the tendency of the
cognitive approach to start with notional categories defined independently of the linguistic sign is Janda’s treatment of aspect in Russian ( Janda 2004), in which the opposition
between discrete solid objects and fluid substances is taken as the source domain for the
metaphor that motivates the grammatical categories of perfective vs imperfective aspect.
Other authors, noting the wild diversity of prefixes producing aspectual effects on the level
of the message expressed in the sentence, have observed that perfectivization by prefixation
is ‘a basically lexical process’ (Brecht 1985:17). Indeed it would be surprising that such a heterogeneous collection of signs should all correspond to one homogeneous meaning. In this
sense, one might tax the cognitive grammar approach with having substituted generative
grammar’s universal logical categories by other categories which are just as universal, even
though they are psychological in nature. The shift from the logical to the psychological is
a positive step. The utilization of universal categories as the starting-point of the analysis,
with the reduction of meaning to perception or perception-like phenomena, is not necessarily a guarantee of progress in the scientific understanding of human language.
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