Abstract This paper re-examines the semantics of Present-day English gerunds by analyzing their collocational preferences. While traditional approaches suggest that a semantic opposition between ‘actions’ and ‘facts’ determines the meaning as well as the distributional preferences of nominal (the signing of the contract) and verbal (signing the contract) gerunds, these claims have not been supported by quantitative evidence. At the same time, more recent studies which quantitatively and qualitatively analyze the meaning of gerunds from a referential perspective lack a distributional dimension. This study presents a semantic typology of the nouns and verbs that are attracted to nominal and verbal gerunds in noun and verb complementation structures by means of a distinctive collexeme analysis which has been applied to contextual collexemes. The analysis shows that, while nominal and verbal gerunds occur in clearly distinctive contexts, this distinction does not appear to be based on an action-fact dichotomy, but is rather determined by the more abstract features of conceptual (in)dependence and temporal flexibility. Finally, it is shown how these abstract semantic profiles can be filled in more concretely by specific contextual slots, thus arriving at a more fine-grained and dynamic perspective on the semantics of English gerunds.

中文翻译：

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重新审视英语动名词

摘要本文通过分析现代英语动名词的搭配偏好，重新审视了现代英语动名词的语义。传统方法表明，“行为”与“事实”之间的语义对立关系决定了名词（合同的签订）和口头（合同的签订）动名词的含义以及分配偏好，但这些主张并没有得到支持。定量证据。同时，从参考角度定量和定性分析动名词的最新研究缺乏分布维度。这项研究提出了一种独特的碰撞分析法，将名词和动词在名词和动词补充结构中被名词和动词动名词所吸引的名词和动词的语义学类型。分析表明，尽管名义上和言语上的动名词发生在明显不同的环境中，但这种区别似乎并非基于行动事实二分法，而是由概念（非）依赖和时间灵活性的更抽象特征所决定。最后，显示了如何通过特定的上下文槽更具体地填充这些抽象语义配置文件，从而对英语gerunds的语义有了更细粒度和更动态的视角。