Functions of Gerundial constructions in Newspaper style

part of adjective phrase: “It might be worth giving him a bell to let him know what’s happening.”

complement of preposition: “Jordan said he would get tough with the homeless by running identification checks on them.”

adverbial: “I didn’t come of it looking particularly well, I know.”

part of noun phrase: “I think he smashed two cars coming down the road.”

All uses, except for the last two ones in the list, which conform to the uses of traditional present participles only, will be regarded as gerundial uses in this paper.
The words ending in –ing are further investigated in a chapter dealing with borderline cases of lexical word class membership as “words with a particularly ambiguous ending” as far as its classification is concerned (Biber 67). The ing-clauses are termed in this section as “ing-participle forms” and are contrasted to nouns and adjectives. The verbal ing-participle forms can take a verbal complementation, such as an object, or are possible to be modified by an adverbial, as opposed to plural-creating concrete nouns which can have determiners and adjectives preceding them, or an of-phrase or relative clause following them. Therefore, the nouns presented in this reference book correspond to traditional verbal nouns, while verbs to traditional gerunds or present participles.
One “particular area of difficulty” is mentioned in the LGSWE and that is the “mixed construction” exemplified by: “There is no denying it” (Biber 67) where both nominal (determiner “no”) and verbal features (object “it”) are present. Such constructions are concluded to be considered verbal, because the verb category is the one that applies to ing-forms in most cases (ibid). It is to be noted here that by virtue of being a mixture of nominal and verbal features, the notion of the “mixed construction” of the LGSWE is the one that most preferably conforms to the traditional term “gerund”.