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Historically, grammarians have described averbal noun orgerundial noun as a verb form that functions as a noun.[1] An example of a verbal noun inEnglish is 'sacking' as in the sentence "Thesacking of the city was an epochal event" (whereinsacking is a gerund form of the verbsack).
A verbal noun, as a type ofnonfinite verb form, is a term that some grammarians still use when referring togerunds,gerundives,supines, andnominal forms ofinfinitives. In English however,verbal noun has most frequently been treated as a synonym forgerund.
Aside from English, the termverbal noun may apply to:
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Verbal nouns, whether derived from verbs or constituting an infinitive, behavesyntactically asgrammatical objects orgrammatical subject.[4] They may also be used ascount nouns and pluralized but cannot beinflected vis-a-vis a given grammatical person.
In English, gerunds used as verbal nouns comprise the suffix-ing. Examples of such uses are given below:
Infinitives used as verbal nouns generally occur as prefaced by theparticleto:
Infinitives used as verbal nouns may not be prefaced by the particleto, however, when elided viaellipsis:
Verbs also may benominalized throughderivational processes, such as suffixes (as indiscovery from the verbdiscover) or by simpleconversion (as with the nounlove from the verblove). The formation of suchdeverbal nouns is not generally aproductive process, that is, it cannot be indiscriminately applied to form nouns from any verb (for example, there is no noun *uncovery for the verbuncover). When they exist, such deverbal nouns often tend to replace the regularly formed verbal noun (asdiscovery is usually used rather thandiscovering, although the latter is still common as a gerund), or else a differentiation in meaning becomes established.
