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I can't distinguish the meanings of gerunds.

  1. The gerund "eating"

  2. The gerund phrase "eating slowly"

Do they refer to the same activity? I think they might both refer to eating slowly, but I think they refer to two different activities.

Are they not different facts, the same as just walking and walking quietly are different?

This doesn't seem the case for nouns. Yellow stone and hard stone can refer to the same thing, not different concepts.

3 Answers3

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This is the semantics of adverbs. Donald Davidson has written on that. Yes, this is very much related to the notion of action. I reccommend reading his Essays on Actions and Events, because the theory he elaborates is hard to explain in a short post.

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The final sentence of your post sums up the fault in your thinking. That two activities have one set of properties in common does not mean they have all their properties in common. Eating chicken is not indistinguishable from eating bread, even though they both have in common the fact that they are forms of eating.

Marco Ocram
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You seem to think that every activity (or every possible phrase about one) is a unique concept, nothing more. I suppose that is possible (though I think unlikely), but there are also nouns that refer to activities ('belief') or processes ('storm'), so I'm not sure what you are showing besides your humorous confusion.