From action nominals to gerund and gerundive: some reflections on the -nd- forms

Abstract With regard to the Latin gerund and gerundive, various problems concerning the origin and the ‘priori-ty’ question are repeatedly debated, and also the uses as allo-forms of the infinitive and as untypical participles still present puzzling issues. This paper addresses these topics from both a typological and diachronic perspective, considering first the relation between the -nd- forms and the other non-finite verb forms, with a focus on the behavior of action nominals. The emergence of passive and modal meanings, on the other hand, is examined by considering the similarities and the correlations between the gerundive and the adjectives in -bilis. The etymological proposal discussed in the last section, centers on the inherited affix *-dh- and supports an explanation of the gerund and gerundive in terms of parallel developments from earlier intransitive action nominals, which follow different evolutionary paths along the lines of a semantic map for anticausative meanings and functions.