gerunds - 'The X-ing of Y' vs just 'X-ing Y' : why are both 'the' and 'of' necessary together?


Take the example of



There is very little that a conforming POSIX.1 application can do by catching, ignoring or masking SIGSYS



(From the SIGSYS article)


This can be rewritten as



There is very little that a conforming POSIX.1 application can do by the catching, ignoring or masking of SIGSYS



Both the and of must be added or the sentence becomes ungrammatical. Is there a grammatical explanation for this?



Answer



Morning! The below is just an hypothesis, but it sounds convincing enough to me.



A gerund is special kind of word: it is both noun and verb at once (just as a participle is both verb and adjective). In its function as a verb, it can have an object:



Augustus condemned his daughter's adultery.


By condemning Julia, he set an example for the Empire.



But it can also have an article and an of attribute like most nouns:



The public condemnation of his own daughter was part of his new policy of chastity.


His laws punishing adultery would have been hypocritical without the condemning of Julia.



Whenever the is used, the gerund is marked as a noun; that is probably why it cannot have an object then, since nouns normally can't have objects. This forces the secondary argument of the word to turn into an of attribute.


Conversely, whenever it has an object, it is marked as a verb, so that it cannot have an article. If there is no secondary argument, the article is free.


Whenever of is used, it is marked as a noun, just as with the. Even though nouns can normally exist without articles, somehow of usually forces the gerund to take the article. Apparently the pattern the + gerund + of became dominant enough to render no article + gerund + of unidiomatic. I can't really say what could have caused this, except that the lack of article may somehow mark it as a verb in this case. Perhaps some more pondering will bring inspiration.


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