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I found the following on a website:

Sarah made singing a priority

"Here, “singing” is a noun following the verb “made.” “Priority” is the direct object of the sentence. “Singing” is a noun acting as an indirect object in the sentence."

My question is how can singing be considered a noun when it is an action?

Noaman Ali
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  • What you quote from a website is incorrect. "Singing", is indeed a gerund noun. But the object of the verb is the phrase "singing a priority". Equally "Sarah liked singing on Sundays" would contain the object phrase "singing on Sundays". – WS2 Feb 18 '20 at 08:20
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    The same way “following” acts as a noun in your opening sentence. – Lawrence Feb 18 '20 at 08:34
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    How can "action" be considered a noun when it is an action? – RegDwigнt Feb 18 '20 at 09:54
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    'Sarah made singing a real priority' has the same surface structure as 'Sarah made Brian a nice cake', 'Sarah made Brian a solemn promise', 'Sarah made Brian a good husband', 'Sarah made Brian a good wife' ... but that's where the similarities end. Many grammarians have looked at this sort of resemblance; although 'Sarah made Brian a nice cake' is clearly the benefactive structure, if I remember correctly there is no consensus over the analysis of the other sentences. But note the paraphrases 'Sarah prioritised singing' and 'Sarah considered singing to be a priority/need'. – Edwin Ashworth Feb 18 '20 at 14:10
  • @Lawrence I noticed, but your comment doesn't really answer the question. – Noaman Ali Feb 18 '20 at 20:03
  • @RegDwigнt It isn't, unless you mean the word 'action,' which happens to be a noun. – Noaman Ali Feb 18 '20 at 20:04
  • "Action" is not a noun. "Action" can be a noun. Or it can be a verb. Or it can be a modifier. Or it can be an interjection. Which part of speech it is is not determined by the word itself. It is determined by the context it appears in. Same for singing. – RegDwigнt Feb 18 '20 at 23:42
  • @RegDwigнt Why does the dictionary identify it as only a noun, then? – Noaman Ali Feb 19 '20 at 06:04
  • I do not know what "the" dictionary you mean, and I am not in charge of ensuring it includes all the words, which no dictionary ever does. Are you trying to argue that things not in your dictionary actually do not exist? – RegDwigнt Feb 19 '20 at 09:37
  • @RegDwigнt What corroboration do you have to prove otherwise? – Noaman Ali Feb 19 '20 at 18:45
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    @NoamanAli It’s a good thing I posted it as a comment instead of an answer, then. :) – Lawrence Feb 20 '20 at 13:22
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    More seriously, though, since you used the same construction yourself, what’s your intuition about this usage of -ing words? – Lawrence Feb 20 '20 at 13:25
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    @Lawrence One wily thing I've observed everyone doing here. – Noaman Ali Feb 20 '20 at 15:07
  • @Lawrence It just seems grammatically right. It's more than just intuition. It's like discovering the source of your 'shine,' lol. – Noaman Ali Feb 20 '20 at 15:10
  • If it seems natural, what’s the essence of your question? – Lawrence Feb 21 '20 at 01:26
  • @RegDwigнt Can you illustrate how "action" can be, as you say, a verb and an interjection? – HeWhoMustBeNamed Apr 20 '20 at 14:43

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The website is poorly written. A gerund is not a "noun": it acts like a noun in most but not all contexts.

Like a noun, a gerund can be the subject or object of a verb but a gerund describes 1. "the action of the verb", and 2. it is qualified by an adverb.

1 "Swimming keeps you healthy." = the action of the verb to swim keeps you healthy.

2 "Swimming quickly gets you healthy." - Note that "quickly" modifies "swimming", not "gets."

Compare with the noun "exercise":

1 "Exercise gets you healthy."

2 "Exercise quickly gets you healthy." - Note that "quickly" modifies "gets", not "exercise."

Edited to change "keeps" to "gets"

HeWhoMustBeNamed
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Greybeard
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    I'm not sure if I think the latter sentence is grammatical. Shouldn't it be 'Exercising quickly...'? – Noaman Ali Feb 18 '20 at 20:09
  • The intention is merely to demonstrate the difference between a gerund and a noun. It is "[Swimming quickly] keeps you healthy." and "Exercise [quickly keeps] you healthy." If you have a better example - and I grant that better ones are numerous - I'd be happy for you to give them. – Greybeard Feb 18 '20 at 22:25
  • I'm not sure if I understand what you're trying to project, but thanks. – Noaman Ali Feb 19 '20 at 06:10
  • @Greybeard Are you saying "Exercise quickly keeps you healthy" is grammatical? If not, you probably should make that clear by explicitly mentioning so in your answer; or, as is the linguistic convention for ungrammatical constructs, preceding the sentence by an asterisk. Also, "swimming" in your sentence (1) can be a noun as well as a gerund (it is only in sentence (2) that it is unambiguously a gerund), though I personally can't think of a better example myself where the ambiguity wouldn't arise. – HeWhoMustBeNamed Apr 20 '20 at 17:41
  • @HeWhoMustBeNamed Are you saying "Exercise quickly keeps you healthy" is grammatical? It is not the best example - change keeps for "gets". – Greybeard Apr 20 '20 at 19:25
  • I like the example given by user97589: "She made singing opera a priority." Here "singing" is the direct object of "made" (so it functions as a noun) and has "opera" as its own direct object (so it functions as a verb). – Andreas Blass Apr 21 '20 at 01:01
  • @Greybeard That is ungrammatical too. As far as I know, the only verb forms that can act as subjects are the infinitive and the gerund forms. If you meant the "exercise" there to be an infinitive, it can't be a bare infinitive: it needs to be a to-infinitive -- though I don't know the grammar rule that applies here. – HeWhoMustBeNamed Apr 21 '20 at 12:44
  • @HeWhoMustBeNamed You seem to be missing the fact that "exercising" was used as a gerund - a substantive whose noun form is "exercise". – Greybeard Apr 22 '20 at 08:57
  • @Greybear No, I am not missing that fact: how does that fact matter? Your example has an adverb, quickly, modifying a noun, exercise, which is ungrammatical. Gerunds can be modified by adverbs (and take direct objects, and cannot take articles, etc.) because they're not nouns, but verbs. – HeWhoMustBeNamed Apr 22 '20 at 16:30
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    I'm not sure how you can say that when I wrote ""Exercise quickly gets you healthy." - Note that "quickly" modifies [get], not "exercise." – Greybeard Apr 22 '20 at 20:56
  • Oh, I see. I missed that. – HeWhoMustBeNamed Apr 23 '20 at 18:09
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As for the question from the title of the article you linked to, the best definition of the term "gerund" that you will find anywhere on the internet is the following: "Gerund is a term that you should forget ever existed in English".

In your sentence the word "singing" functions as the direct object of the verb "make". The word "priority" is a complement of the object "singing".

It leads nowhere to think about verbs as actions, nouns as things etc. The word "singing" does refer to an action, but no less do words like "destruction", "classification" etc. These nouns also derive from verbs, although clearly do not share the suffix with the corresponding verbs destruct, classify etc. There are tons of nouns in English which derive from verbs, and we can make tons more at any given moment.

The key consideration in categorizing words into classes are their distributional properties. So, for example, you won't say "the destruction the city" simply because we distinguish "verbs", as a class of words capable of taking objects, from nouns which cannot do that. It is how we intuitively discriminate between word classes. In the absence of other indicators, we take "singing" to be a noun based on it appearing in a position which is almost reserved for nouns. (not entirely but almost). It is the predicand of the following noun "priority": singing..priority. Or, more generally: She made music her priority.

Depending on how we expand the word "singing" we may think of it as either a noun or a verb (but certainly not as a sort of a mongrel in between these two). Ing nouns and verbs obviously share the suffix, but little more than that. This "little more than that" includes the construction as in your example. Occasionally, a clause headed by an -ing verb can be made an object. So, we won't say that "singing opera" is a noun phrase in:

She made singing opera her priority.

"Singing opera" is an ing clause functioning as the direct object in the structure of this sentence. We don't want to say that "singing" in the original sentence is functionally any different from "singing opera" in the version above. The function is clearly the same, even the form is not. Not only -ing clauses, but also to-infinitival and finite clauses can function as verb object in certain constructions. This is a stance taken by the authors of CGEL and it makes perfect sense.

NOTE: A contributor to the forum says here How is transitivity defined in CGEL? that he "recalls personal discussions with Pullum and Huddleston in which they confirm that only NPs function as objects" . For all I know, this may be true, but in CGEL they took a different position. (which obviously doesn't make a great deal of difference)

  • My powers of inference probably not being what they were, it's not clear to me if you are saying that singing is a noun or a verb in the sentence: Sarah made singing a priority. I'm also interested in your statement Depending on how we expand the word "singing" we may think of it as either a noun or a verb (but certainly not as a sort of a mongrel in between these two). Are you referring solely to the sentence in question or does that apply to all -ing forms? – Shoe Feb 18 '20 at 15:24
  • We don't have any specific syntactic or semantic reasons whatsoever to think about "singing" in the OP in any other way than as a noun. When we think about verbs we think predominantly of the predicator in the sentence structure - it is what verbs normally do. When we think of nouns , the first thing that comes to mind is object or subject. If we try any other verb form in place of "singing" that will obviously not work. For this reason we don't have any more trouble distinguishing the noun "singing" from the verb "singing" than we have in understanding "work" as a noun and not a verb –  Feb 18 '20 at 15:43
  • ..in the same sentence: She made work her priority. How do we know that "work" is not a verb when it has identical form as the corresponding verb? (Oddly enough, nobody asks this question, while the -ing form has become notorious for its dual analysis.) We know it mainly because of its functional position within a very familiar syntactic pattern, and we know it intuitively. We set apart word classes according to their peculiar characteristics, and the lack of characteristics typical of other classes. –  Feb 18 '20 at 15:50
  • Thanks as always for the quick response. So as I understand it the presence of opera turns the noun into a verb. But it seems to me that all singing implies some object (something has to be sung), so why would the implied object not render singing a verb? – Shoe Feb 18 '20 at 15:52
  • The semantic interpretation of the word "singing" in isolation from its syntactic environment also points to its noun-like character. We will mentally group the word "singing" together with other related abstract concept, starting with the closest ones : art, music, painting, singing etc. –  Feb 18 '20 at 15:54
  • And I am by no means convinced in the non-existence of mongrels if by that you mean that all words can be definitively placed into one or other of the word classes. – Shoe Feb 18 '20 at 15:55
  • I don't think that the word "singing" in itself associates us necessarily to the object of singing. I'd rather think that in isolation, we think about it as an abstract concept, not directly related to any particular object. As I said above, -ing nouns are no different than any other noun derived from a verb. Following that criteria we could say that "destruction" is intuitively associated with the thing destructed etc. –  Feb 18 '20 at 15:57
  • Ok, thanks again. They want to kick us into chat. So let me just note that the very frequent and largely inconclusive discussions here on the lines of Is word X a (Word class) Y? confirm me in my elsewhere stated view that usage and grammaticality are more important than terminology and classification. – Shoe Feb 18 '20 at 16:01
  • I don't know Shoe. People have different views on language, I won't get into that. This answer has already been downvoted once (and also upvoted once), and I got the same on other threads where I submitted my answers. I can only say that those who upvoted obviously understood what they were reading and those who downvoted are obviously lost to grammar stuff forever :) –  Feb 18 '20 at 16:07
  • Maybe the downvoter (who wasn't me by the way) disagreed with your classification of singing here as a noun. It would be nice if downvoters could explain their reasoning, but that is not going to happen on this site. And assuming that the time and effort taken to craft a good answer correlates with the number of upvotes it receives is a recipe for disappointment. You didn't respond to my question about mongrels (which I understand as subsective/intersective gradience). But let's return to this when we both have time to chat. – Shoe Feb 18 '20 at 17:32
  • I don't have any doubt that the downvoter has some illuminating ideas on the subject, so I hope he'll be kind enough to contribute them here soon. I'm short of time as it is, so I will let others take over from here for now. We can schedule some time for a quick chat, it would be nice. As for this point, the idea of gradience of -ing forms is illustrated in examples in Quirk's grammar. If you ask me, I don't find it satisfactory and I suggest you change the perspective. There are moot points in word classifications but they are few and far between considering the bulk of the vocabulary. –  Feb 18 '20 at 19:05
  • Yes, but one of the mootest of points concerns the gerund-particpial which is at issue here. I'll move this to chat now and we can maybe pick up on it later. – Shoe Feb 18 '20 at 19:11
  • Let us continue this discussion in chat. – Shoe Feb 18 '20 at 19:11