Referring and non-referring phrases: A study in the use of the gerund and the infinitive By Bent Conrad (review)

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682LANGUAGE, VOLUME 62, NUMBER 3 (1986) Referring and non-referring phrases: A study in the use of the gerund and the infinitive. By Bent Conrad. (Publications of the Department of English, University of Copenhagen, 11.) Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1982. Pp. 188. Reviewed by Arnold M. Zwicky, Ohio State University Numerous works on English grammar have examined the use of the gerund (G: Seeing them is nice; I like seeing them) and the infinitive (I: To see them is nice; I like to see them). As Conrad observes in his first chapter, traditional and pedagogical grammars provide (informal) semantic analyses: some assign different meanings to these non-finite verbal NP's in subject vs. object position, while others assign a single meaning to each, regardless ofposition. When only one of the two NP types is possible, this is assumed to result from an incompatibility between the meaning of the other type and the meaning of the construction in which it occurs. By contrast, structuralist and

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