F. The Gerund and its forms

The forms of gerund coincide with the forms of participle 1: Ving (*the difference is in functions):

In fact, the use of the perfect gerund, both active and passive, is very often redundant, as the time reference is usually clear from the context:

They reported finding the solution of this problem.

With a number of verbs we often tend to find a perfect gerund, although a simple gerund would be sufficient. These verbs include admit, celebrate, deny, mention, recall. Thus, They denied having seen him and They denied seeing him are equally possible.

The translation into Russian usually depends on the meaning and context; very often the gerund is translated with a subordinate clause (especially the passive and perfect forms), but it also can be translated with an infinitive, a participle, a noun with a preposition, etc.:

There is no necessity of making conclusions right now.

Нет никакой необходимости делать выводы прямо сейчас.

He easily reduced equation (17) to the form (18) without using Green's theorem.

Он легко привел уравнение (17) к виду (18), не применяя (без применения) теорему Грина.

Besides being extremely simple, this method is very popular.

Не говоря уже о том, что этот метод очень прост, он очень популярен.

We look forward to much attention being given to this investigation.

Мы ожидаем, что этому исследованию будет уделено большое внимание.

The gerund can be used singly (He was intent on winning), in a phrase after a preposition (She left without saying a word), or in a construction with a noun or pronoun performing this action (It resulted from the experiment being incomplete).

In a gerund construction, the gerund is in predicative relation to a noun or a pronoun. The subject of the sentence is not identical with the subject performing the action denoted by the gerund. The noun can be used in the common case or in the possessive form (in formal style):

This terminology needs the professor/the professor’s improving.

A pronoun should be either a possessive one or a personal pronoun in the objective case: I dislike his/him coming here every day.

I insisted on my/me being examined by our lecturer in algebra.

She insisted on both of them being wrong.

The gerund differs from the participle 1 in being used after prepositions; in performing the functions of the Subject and an Object and emphasizes the action or the state of an object instead of characterizing it (as the participle 1 does).

Remember the prepositions after which we usually use the gerund:

on the account of – из-за;

apart from/aside from – помимо, кроме;

in addition to – кроме, вдобавок;

besides – кроме;

because of – из-за, по причине;

despite/in spite of – несмотря на;

due to – благодаря, вследствие;

except(for) – кроме, за исключением;

instead of – вместо;

owing to – благодаря;

with the object/view to/ with the aim of – с целью; etc.

Exercise 1. Translate the following sentences into Russian using a subordinate clause and paying attention to the prepositions used.

1. Instead of being moved to the right, the dot is moved to the left.

2. We look forward to much attention being given to the use of this approach.

3. In our example we referred to the probability of female’s being colourblind instead of saying “the conditional probability of a randomly chosen person’s being colourblind” on the hypothesis that the person is a female.

4. All the evidence of our experiments is against such statement being true.

5. In addition to describing in detail how to operate with these numbers, he proved a number of theorems.

6. The game took about 2 hours due to explaining all the rules and just general first time learning the new system.

7. Besides observing the changing planet, the Earth observing satellite Landsat 5 recorded and took images of many events in different cities.

8. Despite explaining things numerous times, we were not getting far.

9. We exhibit an example and a proof concerning these facts after giving a slightly simpler system.

10. The simple things become great because of proving underlying phenomena by research.