Sleeping through the night is difficult for me.

Example of gerund verbal. To jump is fun. Davids job is flying helicopters. Infinitives are prefaced with the word to.

He had a unique way of whistling. The dogs worst habit is barking. It is not the main verb in a sentence and is used to mention the reasons of the action taking place.

Forms of the gerund A gerund derived from a transitive verb has the following active and passive forms. Flying is the gerund and flying helicopters is the gerund phrase. You could replace the gerund with another noun such as baseball or gymnastics and the sentence would still make sense.

Killing animals is immoral. An example of a gerund act as a predicate noun would be Lola is sleeping Additional examples include. Such a form of the verb ending in ing and used as a noun is called a gerund or verbal noun.

The infinitive is the base form of a verb with to. The gerund phrase acts as a direct object in the sentence Verbal Example. Therefore a gerund can be a subject object complement or object of a preposition.

Since it functions as a noun it occupies the same position in a sentence that a noun ordinarily would such as subject direct object subject complement and object of preposition. The subject is the thing or person that carries out the action of the verb. A gerund always acts as a noun.