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Look up verbal noun in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Historically, grammarians have described a verbal noun or gerundial noun as a verb form that functions as a noun.[1] An example of a verbal noun in English is 'sacking' as in the sentence "The sacking of the city was an epochal event" (wherein sacking is a gerund form of the verb sack).
A verbal noun, as a type of nonfinite verb form, is a term that some grammarians still use when referring to gerunds, gerundives, supines, and nominal forms of infinitives. In English however, verbal noun has most frequently been treated as a synonym for gerund.
Aside from English, the term verbal noun may apply to:
- the citation form of verbs such as the masdar in Arabic and the verbal noun (berfenw) in Welsh[2]
- declinable verb forms in Mongolian that can serve as predicates, comparable to participles but with a larger area of syntactic use [3]
- ^ Huddleston, Rodney D.; Pullum, Geoffrey K. (2002). The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 81. ISBN 0-521-43146-8.
- ^ Willis, Penny (1988). "Is the Welsh verbal noun a verb or a noun?". Word. 39 (3): 201–224. doi:10.1080/00437956.1988.11435790.
- ^ Poppe, Nikolas (2006). Grammar of Written Mongolian. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. p. 112. ISBN 978-3-447-00684-2.