Timeline for Can "listening" be countable?
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| Jan 20, 2012 at 18:17 | comment | added | Mitch | RE: gerund: Now that you mention it, I'm not actually sure now if in 'the viewing of the deceased', the word 'viewing' is technically a gerund or not. 'Building a house' has a gerund but 'the building of the house' ... it just doesn't feel like a gerund. | |
| Jan 20, 2012 at 15:16 | comment | added | Jay | @Mitch: RE some vs others: No debate there. There are many cases where a certain construct or usage is common with one word but not another. RE when is an -ing not a gerund: Hmm, obviously true that not all words ending in "ing" are gerunds. "There is a blue building on Elm Street" -- "building" is not a gerund. But "The building of the blue house was delayed" -- I thought that was a classic example of a gerund. It's certainly possible that I don't have the definition right, but I thought the examples you just gave are, in fact, gerunds. | |
| Jan 19, 2012 at 21:29 | comment | added | Mitch | It might be clumsy or inarticulate sounding for some '-ing's, but for others it is well establish. 'A 9 o'clock feeding', 'Are you coming for the viewing of the deceased?', 'The author will give a reading', 'The running of the bulls at Pamplona', etc, etc, etc. Also, pedantically, a noun with a verb root with an '-ing' ending is not always a gerund, especially the cases just given. | |
| Jan 19, 2012 at 20:46 | comment | added | Jay | (continued) The whole point of a gerund is to turn a verb into a noun. But "do a <noun>" is an attempt to turn a noun into a verb. Why would you turn a verb into a noun and then right back into a verb? At best it's wasted extra words, and thus it sounds awkward. Also "do a <noun>" is a rather vague and clumsy way to "verbify", which should only be used when there are no more accepted words available. Like, I don't "do a car", I "drive" or "repair" or "build" or whatever. (As always, there might be exceptions where you'd do something like this for emphasis or poetic style.) | |
| Jan 19, 2012 at 20:42 | comment | added | Jay | @Mitch: If the question is, "Can 'listening' ever be used as a gerund?" then the answer is clearly yes ... though I'd say such usage is pretty rare. Your example is about the only context I can think of where it would not sound pretty strange. (I don't doubt there might be some other examples, just not many.) Perhaps I should have given a longer answer to be more clear. You can say, "There were many listenings of the recording", but you wouldn't say, "We did a listening of the recording." "Do a <gerund>" in general is an unlikely construct. (continued) | |
| Jan 19, 2012 at 16:02 | comment | added | Mitch | Certainly one doesn't say "We will be a listening during today's lesson." unless you run around the forest chopping down trees with a girl twice your height, and then that's "a'listening" which is something different. The question is whether 'listening' can be considered a noun, and it certainly can (in the US). "We had many listenings of that recording" is perfectly fine. | |
| Jan 19, 2012 at 15:56 | history | answered | Jay | CC BY-SA 3.0 |