Grammar by Diagram, second edition is a book designed for anyone who wishes to improve grammatical understanding and skill. Using traditional sentence diagraming as a visual tool, the book explains how to expand simple sentences into compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences, and how to employ verbals (infinitives, gerunds, and participles) and other structures for additional variety.
Martin Haspelmath & Ekkehard König (eds.), Converbs in cross-linguistic perspective. Structure and meaning of adverbial verb forms – adverbial participles, gerunds (Empirical Approaches to Language Typology; 13)
Gerunds are behind some of the most confusing and persistent grammar problems. These verbals are found in many sentences, and they function in many ways, which only adds to the confusion. In order to understand how verbals work, it’s essential to understand their meaning and purpose. The definition of gerund describes these verbals as words that are derived from verbs but function as nouns. Gerunds can be recognized by the ending –ing. Unfortunately, this causes a problem because present participles use the same suffix.
