The English gerund as a verbid is characterized by the following features:

(1)Its dual lexico-grammatical meaning of “an action partially viewed as a substance”.

(2)The typical group morpheme -ing.

(3)The grammatical category of:

–voice: active (writing, having written) and passive (being written, having been written);

–tense: the present (simultaneous action) and the perfect forms (prior action);

–aspect: It is connected with the category of tense and is subordinated to this category.

(4)The combinability resembling that of the verb (with adverbs, nouns or pronouns, denoting the object of the action) and that of the noun (with prepositions, possessive pronouns, nouns in the possessive case denoting the subject of the action expressed by the gerund).

(5)Typical syntactic functions of the subject, object, attribute, adverbial modifier.

Together with its subject and other dependent on it words the gerund can form the so called gerundial constructions. In their connections with other parts of the sentence they are treated as one whole.

Being used as in the sentence as a separate word, the gerund fulfills syntactic functions typical of the noun –

those of the subject, object, attribute, predicative: Seeing is believing.

The English Gerund have the following correspondences in Ukrainian:

a)the infinitive (I like reading. – Я люблю читати);

b)the subordinate sentence with the verb predicate (There is no hope of our seeing him this year. – Немає надії, що ми побачимося з ним у цьому році).