Verbal nouns are nouns created from verbs, subject to noun rules but not verb rules. Nouns name things, including actions, and can be inflected. Verbal nouns are different from gerunds. Examples include “walk” and “work”. Verbal nouns can also name the person doing the action, like “cook” and “builder”.
A verbal noun is a noun that has been created from a verb. This means that one form of the verb has been preserved, then made into a noun. The word is then subject to the normal rules of a noun, including number, gender, and other cases, but is not subject to the rules governing verbs. The verbal noun in English often uses the infinitive form of the verb, but it can also use other forms, such as the present tense.
Nouns are descriptive words which, together with action words called verbs, provide the majority of words in a person’s lexicon. The nouns represent names given to things, concepts and objects such as “box”, “wedding ring” and “cat”. Nouns in some languages may be inflected to account for cases such as gender, tense, number, and possession.
The verbal noun is not to be confused with the gerund in English. The gerund is a participle verb, usually one ending in ‘ing’, which can be treated as either a noun or a verb. This means that “to walk” and “to walk,” when not used as verbs, are separate words with different rules. ‘Walk’ is a verbal noun, while ‘walking’ is a gerund. An example of a gerund is “Separation is such a sweet pain.”
Using the word “walk” as a noun, a person is able to say “Taking a walk is good for the soul” or “Every morning I take my dog for a walk”. In both cases given, these are the singular forms of the noun ‘to walk’. You can pluralize the noun to create sentences like “I like long country walks on the weekends.”
The verbal noun exists because nouns are designed to name things. This includes the need to name actions, which are demonstrated by verbs in sentences, but sometimes also the need to be named. Within the grammatical structure of a sentence, the verbal noun often takes the place of the weak verb. For example, in the sentence “Jeff likes to go to work,” the strong verb is ‘go’, while the weak verb or verbal noun is ‘work’.
With verb nouns like “work,” the verb also becomes a locus associated with the action. People go to work in offices, factories or shops, but this workplace is classified simply as work. The same can be said for the product of the action. After painters have finished painting something, they have not only created art, they have also created a ‘painting’. Other examples include “building”, “housing” and “assessment”.
The action or verb can also become a verbal noun when the action is applied to the person doing it. For example, a cook is someone who cooks and a builder is someone who builds. These words often run parallel to existing words for that profession such as chef and bricklayer.
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