Abstract:

The term and its diffusion. The converb, in its vaguest and least critical, also least specific resolution - cf. the notorious conceptual muddle involving -ing forms and constructions in English - is used as meaning “adverbial verb form”, or “verbal adverb”; see the subtitle of Haspelmath and König (eds.) 1995.; mostly and for long it has been known as “gerund”. Definitions reveal the underlying blurredness: Haspelmath (1995:3ff.): “Non-finite verb-form whole main function is to mark adverbial subordination”; Nedjalkov’s (in Nedialkov 1995) is more sophisticated: “a verb-form which depends syntactically on another verb-form but is not its syntactic actant, that is does not realize its semantic valences”: this is surely unsatisfactory, for the converb is arguably actantial in cases like “start walking”. Probably the worst is the definition in Himmelmann and Schultze-Berndt (eds.), 2005:60 “we use the term converb for ‘participles’ which are used primarily as adjuncts”. As Grønbech 1979:35 says of Turkic postpositions and gerundial forms, the converbs are “fluid and hard to hold on to”, which, for a “cross-linguistically valid category” (the title of Haspelmath and König (eds.) 1995, in which see Haspelmath’s and König’s own contributions), is not an ideal condition.