( . . . ) Eh? "Walking stick" is gerund-noun, not participle-noun; it's 'stick for walking', not 'stick that walks', and there's no stress on "stick". Around here there is. If it's a stick for

Gerund-noun compounds are just like noun-noun compounds in that whether ... separately ("ice cream" is the first that comes to mind). Yet we can't comfortably fault the desire to minimize idiosyncrasies by letting spellings

Gerund-noun compounds are just like noun-noun compounds in that whether or not they take hyphens is idiosyncratic; there are plenty of noun-noun compounds that are written separately ("ice cream" is the first that comes to mind). Yet we

Gerund-noun compounds are just like noun-noun compounds in that whether or not they take hyphens is idiosyncratic; there are plenty of noun-noun compounds that are written separately ("ice cream" is the first that comes to mind). Yet we

Yet others - also troublemakers, I fear - feel that there is an intimate relationship between the stress of the ... the noun) are entirely different from gerund-noun compounds like 'wishing-well' or 'walking-stick' (first element

(newsgroups trimmed) (snip) The hyphen is a punctuation mark. One of its important purposes is to smooth the reader's way through prose that ... compound adjectives seem dreadfully complicated. They're also troublemakers and are best

} }> Gerund, like, "The rising of the sun, the running of the deer"? I've }> seen "gerund" used more than one way, but that's the one I know best. }> It's hard for me to imagine anyone saying "the

Gerund, like, "The rising of the sun, the running of the deer"? I've seen "gerund" used more than one way, but that's the one I know best. It's hard for me to imagine anyone saying "the having." I could

Force? You simply can't say "is be having" in English. ... having," but not "is be having" or "is being having." Some(obscure) book on Variation theory in English, says that a participle "having"

"Dimitri, the cabbage farmer in the next town said that ... b/w 1 and 1A, 2 and 2A in semantic force? Force? You simply can't say "is be having" in English. "To be having," yes, and "will be having," but not