ambiguity - Does a ver­bal noun turn back into a verb when mod­ified by an ad­verb?



Here singing is a noun:



  1. I like singing.


But what about here?



  1. I like singing loudly.


Loudly is still an ad­verb, right? But singing is still be­hav­ing like a noun, right?


So which is it, a noun or a verb? How can it be­have like a noun when it gets mod­i­fied by an ad­verb?



Answer



In your sec­ond ex­am­ple, the ob­ject of the verb like is the gerund clause singing loudly, which serves as the NP ob­ject of the verb here. The head of that clause is the verb singing as mod­i­fied by the ad­verb loudly. Like an in­fini­tive clause, a gerund clause is a non-fi­nite verb clause that can serve as an NP when em­bed­ded. Which of the two pos­si­ble verb forms you choose does­n’t mat­ter in this case, as these are equiv­a­lent in meaning:



  1. I like singing loudly.

  2. I like to sing loudly.


Had your verb been a tran­si­tive one, you could have added ob­ject com­ple­ments to your clauses:



  1. I like call­ing her loudly.

  2. I like to call her loudly.


Those ad­mit some ad­ver­bial mo­tion, but only within the non-fi­nite verb clause:



  1. I like loudly call­ing her.

  2. I like to loudly call her.


You can even have a dif­fer­ent sub­ject in that clause than you had in the main sen­tence:



  1. I like her call­ing me loudly.

  2. I like for her to call me loudly.


No­tice how when the to-in­fini­tive clause has a dif­fer­ence sub­ject, you need to stick a spe­cial for-com­ple­men­tizer there when us­ing the clause as an NP as we do here. Read more about these po­tent­ially cu­ri­ous com­ple­men­tiz­ers in this an­swer by Pro­fes­sor Law­ler or in these lec­ture notes from his web­site, or in the notes from this more tech­ni­cal lin­guis­tics lec­ture on the struc­ture of clauses.



I fear that un­til you move on from sim­plis­tic anal­y­sis fo­cussing merely on parts of speech to higher level anal­y­sis of gram­mat­i­cal struc­tures and how these em­bed as syn­tac­tic con­stituents, you will of­ten find your­self stuck with seem­ing para­doxes that can­not be re­solved so long as parts of speech are all you think of. That’s be­cause hu­man lan­guage uses these syn­tac­tic struc­tures, so no anal­y­sis of the for­mer can ex­empt the lat­ter and sur­vive.


Embed­ded deep struc­tures are a fun­da­men­tal part of how hu­man lan­guage works.


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