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1. Their lexico-grammatical meaning is of dual nature. The
verbal meaning of “action, process” is presented as some kind of
“substance” (for gerunds, infinitives) or “quality” (for participles).
The lexico-grammatical meaning of verbids, though
essentially that of the verb (denoting actions) has something of the
lexico-grammatical meanings of other parts of speech. The
gerund, for instance, denotes an action partially treated as a
substance. Thus, in the sentence Going there put an and of her
anxiety the gerund going, though denoting action, presents it at the
same time as a substance which produced the act of putting an end
to something.
2. Verbals have peculiar morphemes, e.g. in English; -ing
(Gerund and Participle I), -ed, -en (Participle II), to (Infinitive); in
Ukrainian -ти (for Infinitives), -ий (for Participles).
3. There is duality in verbids’ combinability. They form
connections with adverbs, nouns, pronouns (denoting objects of
action) like finite verbs, and with finite verbs like nouns or
adverbs. The gerund, for example, may be preceded by a
preposition and a possessive pronoun, like a noun, e.g.: One could
see that without his even speaking. The participle is regularly
connected with nouns, like adjectives, and with verbs, like
adverbs, e.g.: his smiling eyes; smiling slyly, he stretched out his
hand.
4. Their syntactic functions are quite different from those
of the finite verb. They are rarely used as predicates, but they are
used as predicates, but are used in almost any other function in the
sentence.
One of the peculiarities of English verbids is their being
used as secondary predicates. In the sentence I saw them dancing
two actions are named as well as two doers of those actions. But
there is a great difference between I saw and them dancing. I saw
is more or less independent. It makes the predication that is the
core of the sentence or the sentence itself. Them dancing can exist
only in the sentence where there is predication (therefore it is

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