I have been taught verbals before but never how to diagram them. I understand and identify infinitives by thinking of them as prepositional phrases with a verb as the object. Gerunds are verbs ending in -ing, an action, being used as a noun. Participles are used as adjectives and can have many endings.
In chapter 10 I understood most of the content about finite and nonfinite verbs. But later in the first part of the chapter I did nit understand what a gerund was. This was the fist time I have been introduced to it and, will need a little more clarification. It states that a gerund adds -ing and is used as a noun, but I did not understand because that because usually words that end with -ing is a verb.
This chapter covers verbals such as gerunds, participles, and infinitives. This chapter was more a refresher for me. I had trouble at first but after going through the chapter a couple of times, it started to come back to me. The only issues I ran into came when I tried to diagram these sentences. I may need a little more help on figuring out how to diagram these properly. Everything else seem to come back naturally to me though.
Chapter ten goes over verbals. Vitto lists three categories of verbals: infinitives, gerunds, and participles. After she describes what each verbal can contribute to a sentence she gives us several exercises to test our comprehension. I did well on recognizing each verbal phrase, but had trouble identifying which one it was. I also had a bit of trouble with the diagramming which is normal for me. Hopefully today’s in-class activities will shed some light on a few things, as it usually does.
Chapter 10 is fairly simple, though it does trip me up a bit how many different subtypes of each of the three verbal types there are. Infinitives, obviously, are always the unconjugated version of a verb which has “to” before it, but the book goes into more detail on things like infinitive as adjectives and complimentary infinitives, and it gets memorization-ish. Gerunds are super simple by comparison, and participles are about as simple as gerunds, though the inclusion of a subsection on dangling participles makes its section look denser than it really is. Diagramming, as always, gets weird and complicated for me, but not so bad.
Verbals are what’s being discussed for chapter 10. Verbals are broken down into 3 categories: infinitive, gerunds, and participles and each one has it’s unique forms and “definitions.” For some reason, I tend to have trouble with diagramming with pedestals but for this chapter, I found it kind of easy. Maybe it’s the examples she used: “The boy learned to play the piano beautifully,” and “Sally tried to sprint to third base.”
It seems straightforward for the most part and you can understand why it’s like that with the different verbals and diagrams.
Chapter 10 is not terribly difficult. It covers participles, infinitives, and gerunds which all fit under the category of verbals. I’m familiar with all three of these types of verbals, especially infinitives. These are just verbs that have yet to be conjugated, and they can be found throughout the English language. The other two I reviewed a bit more because I remembered a bit less about them, but it all came back as easy as riding a bike.
Chapter 10 is on verbals, shortened forms of clauses. All verbals look like verbs, but can be separated into three categories: infinitives, gerunds, and participles. Infinitives can be utilized as nouns, adverbs, or adjectives, gerunds are always utilized as nouns, and participles are always utilized as adjectives. To distinguish verbs from verbals, one must remember that verbs are finite and verbals are nonfinite. This means that verbs can be inflected according to person and number and can make an assertion, while verbals cannot. I will have to remember that infinitives always take the form of “to followed by a verb,” and that infinitives can be potentially mixed up with prepositional phrases. I will have to refresh myself on noun clauses to fully understand the diagramming of infinitives as nouns. However, it seems straight-forward enough judging from the examples Vitto provides. I will have to look at the “Infinitives as adverbs” section in more detail, to make sure that I don’t mix up infinitives used as adverbs that modify a verb with those that modify an adjective. One thing that might confuse me about this chapter is the different ways in which infinitives used as different parts of speech can be diagrammed. I plan to study the differences and ways of differentiating the different infinitives, to make sure this does not become a problem. I will have to remember the tests for each use of the infinitive, including complementary infinitives.