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The -ing
Form
Amorey Gethin
This article was first posted on the web c.2000.
It is not the purpose here to
give a complete explanation of all aspects of the -ing form; only to draw
attention to some useful principles that are usually neglected.
1. Which verbs can be followed by the -ing
form?
One of the most important simple principles
that grammarians tend to miss is the one that explains what verbs take the -ing
form. The method of almost all books on English grammar is to give a list of
such verbs. This implies that it is completely arbitrary whether a verb takes
the -ing form or not, that God has closed his eyes and pricked off verbs
here and there at random with a pin. Students are thus cut off from insight
into a basic pattern of meaning, and confronted with a lifeless series of
unconnected words which they have to learn by heart. They are pushed into a
purely mechanical process that misses the essential truth that learning
languages is learning about meanings and their logical connections to other
meanings. It is significant of the impractical arbitrariness of these lists
that there are almost no two of them that are the same, even where the most
common of the verbs used with -ing are concerned. note 1
When contrasting the -ing
form with the infinitive, the basic point to remember is that
-ing
can always mean, among other
things, a verb-noun, an
'action-thing'. note 2
The fact that -ing can
always mean a 'thing' gives us the following practical principle:
If you can
say I
(etc.) - verb - it (e.g.
I like it), you can use I - verb -ing (e.g. I like eating).
Avoid it. Avoid
stepping on the grass if you can.
Do you
mind it? Do you mind shutting the window?
He
couldn't risk it. He couldn't risk hurting the children.
This is a
principle virtually without exceptions. But naturally there are many verbs that
in practice are never used with -ing simply because nobody ever wants
to express that 'action' meaning of -ing with them. The process is
always self-regulating, so to speak - one says whatever makes sense. We can
look at some examples of the use of -ing with verbs that appear on few,
if any, of most grammarians' lists.
They have added
mistreating prisoners to the list of charges.
I can't
really afford living like this.
The
council no longer allows smoking in public buildings.
aim - (It is hard to think of a sensible example of -ing
being used with this verb. Can you?)
The club arranges
dancing for the pensioners.
The
chairman claimed breaking the strike as a great triumph.
I don't count
making money as a virtue.
The
investigators discovered cheating on a huge scale.
We must encourage
planting earlier in the season.
I thank
travelling for teaching me much about the human condition.
The
principle applies equally to phrasal verbs, both the 'prepositional' type and
the 'adverbial particle' type.
She insisted
on helping me.
Bill's putting
off writing till tomorrow. (Or: ...putting writing off..)
The
managing director picked out idling on the job as the main cause of the
declining profits.
turn up - (Another example of a verb I am unable to
think of any sensible use for with -ing.)
(Notice
that in the second and third sentences above, an it used instead of the -ing
form would come between putting and off and between picked
and out.)
There are
uses of -ing which appear to contradict the it-substitution principle.
Two examples of them involve expressions that both have the sense of continue:
carry on and go on. One can say Carry on talking, but not
*Carry on it. That, however, is merely because unemphasized pronouns are
never used at the end of phrasal verb phrases (e.g. in a dictionary one looks
it up, not *looks up it). With go on one cannot even say *go
it on. This again can be explained simply. One does not *go a thing,
while with the sense of continue one does not say *go on it for
the same reason that one does not say *Carry on it.
2. No
grammatical analysis of different -ing forms is necessary
When they
discuss how to use the -ing form, grammarians as a rule insist on
distinguishing between 'present participles', 'gerunds', 'gerundives', and
'true nouns'. There is no need to do this; in fact, worrying about such
distinctions is very confusing for many students of English. All one needs to
know and remember are the several different ways the –ing form can be
used. Categorisation like the above is quite unnecessary, and indeed merely
adds an extra burden of knowledge to be memorised without serving any useful
purpose. It needs to be recognised that grammatical analysis is usually no more
than what one might call wisdom after the event – you can never carry out a
grammatical analysis until you know the meaning of the sentence you want to
analyse. At that stage grammatical analysis becomes pointless.
Here is a
list of most of the different ways in which –ing can be used. It can be
used like this:
1. I am
thinking (about Nina). [Finite Continuous -ing]
2. Thinking
(about her) makes me happy. [Subject -ing]
3. I like
thinking (about her). [Object -ing]
4. I never
get tired of thinking (about her). [Preposition + -ing]
5. I like
Nina thinking about me. ['Double Object': Object 1 (Nina) - Object 2 (-ing)]
6. I'm
sure there are other people thinking about her. [Predicative
Adjective -ing]
7. I like thinking
people, and Nina is a thinking sort of person. [Attributive
Adjective -ing]
You can
see from these examples, I think, that the –ing form is remarkably
flexible. So long as you are aware that these are the possibilities, you can
make -ing mean more or less whatever you want it to mean within those
possibilities, without worrying about its grammatical definition. (You don't
really even need the brief analysis I have added after each sentence above, but
I have provided them in case you find it easier to learn in a 'categorising'
sort of way – though I don't recommend it.) Don't forget that you cannot make
any grammatical analysis before you understand the meaning. Since the meaning
is the only thing we are really interested in - if we are sensible - there is
seldom much point in pursuing grammatical abstractions once we have grasped the
meaning. Let us consider various examples of the use of -ing.
The phrase
boiling water is, by itself, ambiguous. boiling could be a
description of the water (it's boiling); or it could be referring to what
somebody is doing to the water. But if we say We need boiling water, it
is clear we mean water that is already boiling; while if we say Start
boiling water, it is clear we mean that somebody should boil water.
In the
phrase a steaming kettle, a obviously belongs to kettle,
not to steaming; in the same way, in Pour the boiling water into this
pot, the refers to water, not to boiling, and we are
again talking about water that is already boiling. But suppose we want to say,
using the -ing form, that we recommend that somebody should boil water
every morning. We cannot say We recommend the boiling water every morning,
because although that is a perfectly good and sensible sentence, we have just
seen that it must mean something quite different from what we want to express.
What we have to say is: We recommend the boiling of water every morning. Now
the belongs to boiling, not to water.
But we
should never forget that the overall meaning of a particular piece of language
depends on the particular combination of the particular meanings used. For
instance, the two sentences
The Red Cross stopped shooting prisoners.
The Red Cross stopped the shooting of prisoners.
mean two
quite different things. The first sentence tells us that the Red Cross had been
shooting prisoners. The second is almost certainly intended to mean that
somebody else - not the Red Cross - had been shooting prisoners, and the Red
Cross stopped this somebody else doing any more shooting. In other words, in
one sentence the Red Cross shoots prisoners, and in the other it doesn't.
But we
must not draw from these two sentences the general conclusion that when there
is no the, the -ing action is carried out by the subject of the
main verb, but that when there is a the, the -ing action is
carried out by somebody else. For instance, we can say:
I support sending more aid to poor countries.
This does
not mean that I myself am going to send more aid to poor countries; it only
means that I think that this is a good thing for people to do. But if we say
instead I support the sending of more aid..., it makes no difference at all
to the basic meaning of the sentence, and that is because of the particular
meaning of support. In the next three sentences, on the other hand, with
no the in the first, but a the in the other two, you will see
that in every case it is I who performs the -ing action:
I hate decorating. I don't mind the actual painting.
But I can't stand all the getting ready beforehand.
Consider
also the next two sentences.
I don't like helping politicians.
I don't like lying politicians.
They are
identical in every respect except one. They both consist of I don't like
-ing politicians. The difference between them is merely that one
uses help- and the other uses ly-. Yet this is enough to make it
clear that in the first sentence I do (or rather, don't want to do) the helping,
while in the second the politicians do the lying. note
3
Shooting prisoners is barbaric.
The shooting prisoners broke out of the camp.
The shooting of prisoners is barbaric.
The shooting of the new recruits is not at all good.
Knowledge of history is rare among these people.
The knowledge of history among these people is
remarkable.
A knowledge of history helps one to understand the
situation.
I honour and admire the loving women who look after us
so tenderly.
The wood is dry enough now for burning.
This part of the country is too hilly for cycling.
Is the water deep enough for diving?
(cf. She is too young for marrying. Is this a
sensible sentence? I am not sure. It depends how one interprets it.)
I have seen several sinkings myself.
The beheadings were too awful to watch.
The guards opened fire on the escaping prisoners.
He campaigns for the abolition [not abolishing]
of torture [not torturing] throughout the world.
And do not be confused by -ing nouns that are
not 'action-things' (not 'verb-nouns'), but 'ordinary' nouns. A painting
and a meaning are examples of such words. He was in the middle of
painting this painting when he died is an illustration of the two types
being used together.
3. The -ing form or the infinitive?
Here again the grammatical explanations tend to become
a mass of 'small' generalizations that are mostly untrue and miss the essential
principle. This is that:
-ing emphasizes
the action itself.
The infinitive (and
non-ing generally) emphasizes some other aspect of the verb:
the fact, event, result, effect, achievement of the
action.
It is impossible to describe the meaning of words
completely accurately with words. In the end the only wholly correct indication
of the meaning of words is the words themselves. But I think the two statements
above are about as close as we can get to the truth about -ing and non-ing.
Here are some examples of the difference.
I like to
get up really early,
around 5, as I can get so much more done in the day that way. But I have to
confess I don't like actually getting up at that hour at all.
I prefer cycling to work. It's much more fun than sitting in car queues.
I prefer to
cycle to work. It's good for me.
She was
afraid to go near
the edge, because she was afraid of falling off.
(It was not the action itself of going near the edge
that she was afraid of - it was dangerous, and might result in disaster, but
would not in itself hurt her; the action that would itself hurt her, and that
she was afraid of, was falling off the edge.)
Very often it makes little or no practical difference
whether one uses -ing or the infinitive. But in some contexts the
difference is obvious and crucial. There is, for instance, a wholly logical
reason why one cannot use an infinitive after enjoy. This is because one
can only enjoy actions themselves; one cannot enjoy the fact or result
of an action. The meaning of enjoy simply does not fit the meaning of
the infinitive. (The same principle applies to loathe.) Consider, too,
that we do not normally say I can smell something burn; we say I can
smell something burning. And
Max saw
Marie cross the road.
means something quite different from
Max saw
Marie crossing the road.
In the first sentence Max finally saw Marie on the
other side of the road, the crossing achieved, and she had presumably escaped
the danger of the traffic. In the second sentence the emphasis is on the action
of crossing itself, actually in the road. Perhaps the next moment Marie was run
over by a bus. There is nothing in the sentence to tell us she was not.
Certainly there are problems with some verbs. Want
is one of the most important examples. But it illustrates well how, on one
hand, the basic principle is nearly always at work, and, on the other, how
important the subtleties of exact meaning are. We can say They want it,
so we can say
The plants want watering.
However, this is not at all the most common use of want.
(The meaning is very close to the meaning of The plants need watering.)
The common use of want is, of course, as in
I want to
water the plants.
But when one says want to do..., one is talking
of the wish to 'achieve', to accomplish something - not a feeling of concern
with an 'action in itself'. When one says
I want
that flower.
one expresses a wish for possession. That is not the
same as a 'want to do' feeling, but it is not an -ing feeling either. It
is only when want takes on a 'need' sort of feeling that it becomes
logical to use -ing. But the effect of want having various
different meanings is further illustrated by the fact that we can also say
things like
I don't
want you messing about in the garden and stepping on all the plants.
Try is another verb that shows how
important the precise meaning of a word is. The try to do expression is
very obviously about achievement, not about action in itself:
Try to
protect these plants from frost.
But try it expresses the idea of 'experiment
with', so just as we can say Try a richer compost on those plants, we
can say
Try giving
them less water.
When one explains the -ing or infinitive
alternatives, it is important to use examples such as remember and forget.
But it is doing learners a great disservice simply to state, as if it was just
an arbitrary rule without reason, that -ing is used for actions before
the remembering or forgetting (I don't remember posting the letter, but
I think I must have) and the infinitive for acts after the
remembering or forgetting (I'm afraid I forgot to post the letter). The
most important part of the explanation is showing why remember
and forget work like this. They are not some special case with their own
peculiar rules. Whenever people remember or forget something (it), the
something must be in the past. This is the very essence of the words' meaning.
We cannot remember or forget a thing before we have experienced it. So
the usage of remember and forget has to be as it is. Compare
these words with one like anticipate. In the sense that we are concerned
with here, the meaning is the opposite of remember, and so naturally the
-ing form must mean actions after the anticipating (I don't
anticipate having any difficulty at the customs). As practically always,
the grammatical usage follows the logic of the meaning.
There are indeed several verbs whose use seems
logically inconsistent. note 4
But learners of English should always be suspicious of
statements that "you cannot use such and such a pattern with this verb”,
or “use that verb in such and such a way". As often as not the statement
is untrue. It may only be that situations where such language would be used are
rather rare in real life, and the grammarian has failed to use enough
imagination in thinking of them. And it would be a great pity to let any
genuine inconsistencies make one lose sight of the overall basic principles
that are undoubtedly at work and give insight into the language.
Note
1 The only sort of special list that
verbs should appear in is an alphabetical one that shows, with examples, all
the various types of expression that each verb can govern. For instance, suggest:
(a) She
suggested going to a concert. [+ -ing]
(b) I
suggested (that) we took/should take a taxi. [+ that + subjunctive]
(c) Please
suggest where we should go. [+ interrogative + should/ought]
(d) "I
suggest," said the prosecutor, "that you are lying." [+ that +
indicative]
Seeing
'real life' associations of a word with other words is how one learns its exact
meaning and how one remembers how it is used.
I compiled
such a verb list in 1959, and it was possibly the first of its kind to be
published when it appeared in 1967 in Cook, J.L., Gethin, A. & Mitchell,
K., A new way to proficiency in English (Blackwell). The only other book
I know of that contains such a list is Close, R.A., A reference grammar for
students of English (Longman, 1975).
A.S.Hornby
devised an elaborate system based on tables of all the possible patterns of
English that verbs can be used in. Together with each pattern there was a list
of all the verbs that can be used with it. Dictionaries were published in which
each verb entry was given a number which referred to the pattern or patterns
used with that verb. There could not be a more misguided approach. Again it is
an abstract and lifeless way of thinking about the verbs, quite the wrong way
round. The starting point should be the individual verb, which, together with
the context, should trigger the usage that goes with it. But I do not advise
anybody to learn the usage of the verbs by heart; only to remember its
importance, to remember that in some ways it is very different from that of other
European languages, and to remind yourself of how to use a particular verb
whenever you are unsure.
There
should, in fact, be no need for special lists of verbs with their patterns of
use, neither of my kind nor any other kind. Any good dictionary, even quite a
small one, should include the respective patterns (with examples) in the entry
for each verb.
Note 2 There are -ing forms that seem to lack the 'action' element in some contexts, most obviously being and having. But the 'thing' element is always there, so there is no practical problem.
Note 3 This is a case where some grammarians might
make the mistake of saying that the correct explanation is as follows: Help
is a transitive verb, and therefore politicians is its object; lie
is an intransitive verb, and therefore politicians cannot be its object.
But this is
to put the matter the wrong way round. One can only decide to call help
transitive and lie intransitive after one has understood the meaning of
both words and context. The grammatical analysis does not give any information.
There are
also grammarians who claim that in
sentences like The Red Cross stopped the shooting of prisoners, shooting is
a 'true noun', not a gerund. Do they say this because there is a definite
article in front of it? But the in front of a word does not make a noun
any more of a noun than it is without it. The word knowledge is no more
or less a noun in any of the sentences Knowledge is power, Knowledge of
history is rare among these people, The knowledge of history among these people
is remarkable, or A knowledge of history helps one to understand the
situation. In the same way, shooting
remains a verb-noun, or an action-thing, whether it is as in Shooting
prisoners is barbaric, or The shooting of prisoners is barbaric, or We
must stop the shooting of prisoners. We would not usually say something
like We must stop the shooting
prisoners, because there shooting has become a
verb-adjective, and the phrase means that the prisoners are doing the shooting.
We saw the same sort of meaning in the phrase The boiling water.....
above. Once again, grammatical analysis serves no useful purpose.
Note
4 Cease
is just one example of such inconsistency. Stop, when used with roughly
the same sense, cannot be followed by an infinitive. (stop followed by to + an infinitive means stop in
order to). But cease is often followed by an infinitive, as well as
by -ing. Yet "roughly" may be a very important point here. There are
important differences even between these two verbs. If one is talking about
someone walking along, one cannot say that he ceased instead of stopped.
And a doctor fond of slightly eccentric speech would have to say Cease
breathing (emphasis on action), not Cease to breath. The latter
would sound like a command to die.
A rational explanation based on
meaning can very often be found hiding beneath apparent grammatical
inconsistencies.
Slightly edited, with
revised layout, 21 April 2010
The Editor welcomes your comments or contributions to discussion
of this article.
The article is an
edited extract from The Art and Science of Learning Languages, by Amorey
Gethin and Erik V. Gunnemark and published by Intellect (http://www.intellectbooks.com)
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Form, or parts of it, on
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