4.2. PARTICLES 171
and that’s nominalisation. This is a very powerful ’feature’, because it lets
us talk about phrases as if they were nouns. It lets us say things like ”I
didn’t like walking around town today”, where ”walking around town
today” is technically treated as nominalisedclause, and thus acts as noun.
”(I) didn’t particularly enjoy today’s walk about the city.”In this sentence, the clause , ”to walk the city”, has been
turned into agerundive(a gerund is the noun form of a verb: ”to walk”→
”the walking”) by : meaning ”the specific walking the city
that was done”, as noun. With this noun form we can then make all sorts
of comments in relation to it.
However, this nominalisation is restricted to events that are in-topic.
If some activity or event is a context to a conversation, then can be used
to nominalise it, but if we want to talk about events or activities in general,
we have to use
. We can actually use either , or without the ,
to say two different things. Comparing all three with a series of examples,
we see the following:
”I forgot to post the leĴer.”
why: , ”posting a leĴer” as specific activity, was forgot-
ten.”I forgot that I had to post a leĴer.”
why: , ”posting a leĴer” as the idea of performing a
specific activity, was forgoĴen.”I forgot how to post a leĴer.”
why: , ”posting a leĴer” as the concept in general, was
forgoĴen.As is evident from the example sentences, using (as a back re-
ferral) lets us talk about a specific instance of an activity, lets us talk
about the same specific instance, but as an abstract concept rather than the
activity, and just talks about the general activity, rather than some spe-
cific instance.