I would like to ask about a basic sentence that really confuses me.
My favorite sport is swimming.
I think it is strange. "Swimming" can be interpreted as a gerund ("I like to swim; it is my favorite sport") but also as a verb ("What my favorite sport does is swim"). I would like to resolve the ambiguity, so swimming can only be interpreted as a gerund. How do I go about that?
Best Answer
There is nothing to correct. In that sentence swimming is a noun, just as football, for example, would be.
Rather than use the term gerund, I find it more helpful to describe a word such as swimming as the ‘-ing’ form of the verb and then go on to identify the role it plays in the clause under consideration. In your example it is, as I have said, a noun and is the subject predicative, or complement of is. It can also occur as a verb and an as adjective. As a verb, it is used to form the present progressive construction to indicate a current event, as in, for example I am swimming. As an adjective it can modify a noun, as in swimming birds. This use has to be distinguished from something like swimming club, in which swimming is a noun modifying another noun.