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Historically, grammarians have described a verbal nounorgerundial 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:
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Verbal nouns, whether derived from verbs or constituting an infinitive, behave syntacticallyasgrammatical objectsorgrammatical subject. [4] They may also be used as count nouns and pluralized but cannot be inflected 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 the particle to:
Infinitives used as verbal nouns may not be prefaced by the particle to, however, when elided via ellipsis:
Verbs also may be nominalized through derivational processes, such as suffixes (as in discovery from the verb discover) or by simple conversion (as with the noun love from the verb love). The formation of such deverbal nouns is not generally a productive process, that is, it cannot be indiscriminately applied to form nouns from any verb (for example, there is no noun *uncovery for the verb uncover). When they exist, such deverbal nouns often tend to replace the regularly formed verbal noun (asdiscovery is usually used rather than discovering, although the latter is still common as a gerund), or else a differentiation in meaning becomes established.