NOT with gerunds: rule, exceptions and difficult cases

Schoolchildren easily remember that NOT with gerunds is spelled separately, as well as with the verb from which this part of the speech occurred:

• Not having learned to distinguish parts of speech, schoolboys are confused in application of spelling rules. Therefore, it is impossible to become a truly literate person without knowing the basics of morphology.

The exception to this rule are cases where the word without this particle is no longer used:

• Kirillov, hating the strange city in which no one was dear, was always silent. Residents of the house, disliking the surly neighbor, avoided him. Only one sagacious Anna Sergeyevna, indignant at the folly of the townsfolk, saw in the arrival of a good, but very unhappy man.

Also, remember that the prefix NEDO- is an indicator of the merged spelling:

• Father, not getting enough sleep , daily worked on his scientific project. But he made a real discovery, simply overshadowing the children who accidentally spilled reagents on the table.

The insidiousness of an easy, at first glance, orthography "Spelling NOT with gerunds", is the presence of homonymous forms. The words, which are identical in sound, have a different lexical meaning in the Russian language.

For example, gerunds "not eating" and "not eating" are written differently.

Let's compare:

• Maria, always, not eating (does not eat until the end) her breakfast, the first goes to work.
• During the war, people lived, malnourished (ate a little, poorly fed) for months.

Focusing on the categorically separate writing NOT with gerund, many forget about derivative prepositions and dialects.

Indistinguishable from each other verbal participles and the parts of speech formed from them is the biggest problem for schoolchildren studying the topic "NOT with gerunds."

Examples of difficult spelling:

• Despite (gerund) to my mother's eyes, Andrei told me about his secret.
• Despite (his pretext) his excitement, the speaker acted with dignity.
• Without hesitation (gospel), not a minute, we went to Moscow.
• Leave the room immediately (adverb)!

In order not to make a mistake, you need to know the grammatical features of these parts of speech and correctly ask the question that interests the word. If we have a verbal participle, then we can ask questions ("what are we doing?" And "what's done?").

In addition, this part of speech can easily be turned into a verb from which it was formed. In this case, the meaning of the proposal will not change.

Derived prepositions have no independent meaning. Their role is reduced to the expression of the syntactic dependence of the nominal parts of speech from other words. The preposition will thus remain in the question and in the answer:

• Despite the (what?) Difficulties, we coped with the task with dignity.

The adverb most often refers to the verb, since it indicates the sign of action.

By the way, it is worth paying attention to the word "reluctantly". This adverb, which has lost its connection with its ancestor, which has disappeared from the tongue, is a gerund, although always written together:

• Sitting late, guests (how?) Reluctantly began to disperse.

Fortunately, words in which you can make mistakes, confusing them with gerunds, in modern Russian is not so much. Remembering several homonymous pairs of words, students quickly learn the orthogram "NOT with gerunds."