From M L - California, USA
"In your Grammar Notes - Phonetics page you mentioned that phonetics is a 'true'
grammatical instrument. To be honest, I never heard of such thing. Could you please detail this topic?"
LSEG was (first) written for a beginner-intermediate level, although there are many topics included which
are in fact extremely advanced: using phonetics as a grammatical instrument is one of them. Consider the
following.
Present participle and present gerund have identical forms: both are referred as being the
"-ing"
form. In order to differentiate each of them appropriately, three methods are presented in LSEG, as follows:
Method 1 - Analysis of the morphological status
(General) rules:
1. Present participle is a verb working as an adjective or adverb.
2. Present gerund is a verb working as an equivalent-noun of verbal origin.
Method 2 - Analysis of the accompanying and preceding word
(General) rules:
1. Present participle may be preceded only by conjunctions.
2. Present gerund may be preceded only by prepositions.
Method 3 - If both methods above fail--this may happen in some particular
instances--phonetics can still
solve the problem
(General) rules:
1. Present participle preceding a noun has either a principal or a secondary phonetic
accent, while the noun takes a primary accent.
2. Present gerund preceding a noun has a principal phonetic accent, while the noun has
a secondary accent.
Examples of using each instance above are presented in LSEG.
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