I just realized how odd it is that "knitting" can be a noun as well as the obvious verb.

"What are you knitting" is obvious.
"Is this your knitting?" is the noun.

Are there other verb/nouns like this? I can't at the moment think of any other nouns that end in -ing . . . well, other than "king" and "thing" and "ring". OK - there are several, but they don't look so much like verbs, do they?

You can take pretty much any verb in it's -ing form and make it a noun. The term is gerund.

I like your singing.
I'm improving my speaking.
Editing is easy.
I like writing.
Swimming is fun.

Yes, but in CW's second construction, knitting is not a gerund, is it?

In all of gooofy's constructions you could insert the words 'act of' in front of the -ing word, without changing the sense. But you can't do that in CW's second example: "This is my knitting" refers to the thing produced, not the act of knitting.

Along CW's lines, her own example brings to mind that you can make a weaving. And a story of my wife's brings to mind the professions of nursing and engineering.

It seems to me in CW's case knitting isn't a gerund, though I am not sure. You're right that you can't put "act of" in front of it.

Yet, I do know that there are "ing" words that are not gerunds. Wordnerd brings up 2 important ones. My profession, nursing most definitely is not a gerund, and that I know for sure. We have had many scholarly discussions of it. The same is true of engineering.

quote:

Originally posted by wordnerd:
Yes, but in CW's second construction, knitting is not a gerund, is it?

You're right, I guess it isn't!

"This is my knitting" refers to the thing produced, not the act of knittin

Well, it probably started out as a verbal noun (or gerund). My OED1 only gives definitions of the knitting as an activity and not the product of such an activity. It seems to me, rather than positiing some new and rare (and non-productive) suffix that is substantially different from the present particpial and gerundial desinence in English, that the meaning of knitting evolved from such the activity to the product of that activity.

An aside, the present participial and the gerundial ending were different in Old English, but they collapsed together during the Middle English period.

Cool - thanks, guys!

quote:

the present particpial and gerundial desinence

"disinence"?

That's desinence. A rarely seen word.

I didn't mean cognitive dissonance; I meant a desinence. Do you doubt the word's existence or my usage?

quote:

Do you doubt the word's existence or my usage?

Neither.


Y esto tampoco no es firma.

quote:

Originally posted by zmjezhd:
I didn't mean cognitive dissonance; I meant a desinence. Do you doubt the word's existence or my usage?

Usage, self-conscious, perhaps?

Usage, self-conscious, perhaps?

Perhaps. I suppose I sould have typed "the grammatical endings for verbal adjectives and verbal nouns were different in Old English". Sorry about that.