Grammar Gerund VS Participles and Past Progressive????

I use a memory trick—people frequently lie in bed together. See the double meaning there? It's clever, therefore it helps you remember to use lie when people are in bed (together or alone) or otherwise lying prone, like on the floor or the ground. And if people lie, that means things lay.

It gets a bit more complicated, because when people lie together, they're often getting laid. Or trying to. But people don't lay (except in dialect, as pointed out above). Things get laid or mislaid. People getting laid is slang. Lol, the problem is all this cleverness can cause some confusion unless you really keep the joke firmly in mind.

 

I believe though that you can lay yourself down. That's different, because laying is an action you're performing on a thing—yourself. Like in the song: Like a bridge over troubled water / I will lay me down.

You can lay yourself down, or lay someone else down if you've been carrying them. They become an object, it's their body (or yours) that you're laying down.

 

Aha - I bet some of these sentences would have been more idiomatic if you'd written them in Swedish instead. It isn't a language I know but I understand there are differences in which tenses are used.

I believe these things are not ineptitude or really errors, but that the brain is stretching the second-language to make it do things it can habitually do in the first-language.
Sometimes this produces valuable new constructions, which is an area of interest for me. My suggestions would be to speak in preference to reading, and to concentrate on the tenses rather than the participle/gerund issue. I think it isn't the grammar of the tenses so much as the creative nuance of selecting which tense best expresses the idea.

 

A sentence with no verb is not a sentence. The sentence as written has a verb attached to "light," but no verb attaching to the main subject, "Ship cores." As used, "exploding" is an adjective, and "exploding in light that will last for minutes" is an adjectival phrase modifying/describing "ship cores."

 

Someone once said (or wrote), "Rules are made to be broken." Rules are broken in writing, but they are broken successfully when the writer knows the rule and breaks it intentionally for a specific effect. A collection of words with no verb attached to the primary subject is NOT a sentence. It may be a phrase or a clause, but it's not a sentence. Can a non-sentence be used for effect in creative writing? Certainly. But it is breaking the basic rule about sentence construction, and it has to work.

 

How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties,
in form and moving how express and admirable,
in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!

[The dark] is lighting up with fire. Ship cores exploding in light that will last for minutes.

These aren't sentences with no verb (and no subject).
Shakespeare takes [Man is] from what precedes.
And in the OP the auxiliary verb [to be] is omitted from "to explode".
It's still there, and it still has to follow the syntax and agree, we just don't say it.

Exploding isn't modifying the ship cores, but saying what they do.
'exploding' is rarely used adjectivally (because it's final and momentary): but in the OP the narrator isn't contemplating his biting knives, or cheering the dancing girls, or charging his exploding cores. The cores are exploding.
Moreover, (i) adjectives are an idea belonging to the noun, whilst a verb is external to the noun. And (ii) with participles the two uses can be distinguished by word-order: adjectival participles take the natural syntactic position of an adjective before the noun, but verbal ones are placed after it.
So an exploding core is paradoxical, but a core exploding is unfortunate.

Shakespeare isn't breaking any rules. If a grammar says "The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!" is breaking a rule, or that it isn't a sentence, then it's a bad grammar.

==

The local dialect around me has phrases like:-

"Eating yer food!"

Which is naturally understood as "Be eating yer food!" - and this works because the omitted verb is in the imperative voice. Grammatically it's still there, it's just not said.

==

Two more points:-

Verb-omission was part of "the rules" before the English language emerged.
And there are some constructions where the verb has to be omitted:-

"All this for a single Like!"

 

Interesting discussion popping up about what you can do with the language. So in a sense, grammar is important, but creativity is also important. Know what you do, and you can break the rules eloquently.

Good advice, thank you, evild4ve! There was a time when I did speak English with English speakers a bit more, through online games via microphones. I have every chance to get back into that sort of environment, so perhaps I should take it as an opportunity to learn. While continuing to read books, of course.

 

I thought about this some more and native speakers are often imprecise about which tense. When it isn't written down nobody minds - but I think it is good practice to do it 'on the hoof' and to have to continually adjust so as not to confuse the other person.
When writing we will often pause for a little while to decide if "may" or "might" is better - usually either will parse and be grammatical but in the creative context we mean one over the other.

Dialect complicates this - because the other language underneath (which for us is often some forgotten tongue of the British Isles that survives only as traces in our brain-structure) might have organised its tenses, voices and moods differently from the imperial language.
The vaguenesses of English's grammar helps it absorb and dominate conquered languages.
If we can't make ourselves clear, then we are poorly-educated. But if the meaning is clear and people want to say that our dialect-grammar is wrong, often it is really their xenophobia. Longer ago, languages marked us as members of our racial group - and we didn't want competing tribes to understand too well.
When our group is conquered and made to speak English, we compensate for this by pretending to speak English better than all the others. We try to hold Chicago or Oxford above Delhi and Johannesburg.

 

So, the obvious, of course, is that we have several sentences that are not actually sentences. That's fine, but it complicates any analysis of ing and past progressive. Overall, I like the example, and overall I'd not call for any changes. Maybe it's too good of an example of when it would be a good idea to go to past progressive. Let me explain.

Imagine what most people do when they clause out a sentence with a gerund. They are adding a noun, in hopes of enhancing description. That noun may either be the subject or an object.
When it is the object (usually a clause after the core of the sentence), it elongates the sentence. It often adds onto the sentence. Now you have a longer sentence that is artificially lengthened in order to promote a second object. But, as you are showing above, in your unusual example of how they might be used, shorter sentences that cover a single topic can be much more powerful. They are also easier to read and more direct. In that regard they facilitate faster pace, and most times when authors get lengthy with their prose pace suffers unnecessarily, causing readers to put the book down because it's not nearly as pleasurable to read as it is to write--(lots of counter example, I know).

One of the primary goals of many writers is to be more direct, write clean sentences, facilitate a faster and readable pace, and thus retain the reader with sentences whose qualities exceed their quantities. Write great sentences, not unfocused ones. All of that relates to issues nobody much mentions when speaking about gerunds, but to me it's the biggest one.

The second issue relates to past progressive. Past progressive means, in a nutshell, that what we have happening RIGHT NOW (in whatever timeframe your story is in), is of immediate personal consideration. It isn't that Joe ran to the store. It's that Joe was running to the store. Now, this is really not a gerund issue (being a verb), but it is an ING issue and a past progressive issue, one that you packed in with this post, and definitely worth thinking about in context with your example. Something about the act of running needs immediate consideration. In the first example of RAN, it's simply how he got there. Maybe later it's important to say he leaned over while PANTING. In other words, yeah he ran, but now he's suffering, and the suffering is what we care to focus upon.

The problem with using past progressive without thinking about what you are doing is that it causes the reader to focus upon items that the writer has no intention of following through with. Why are we focusing upon running, when it's just a fact and of no immediate concern. it's just how he moved. It isn't something of consequence that requires us to spend time dealing with.

That said, your example above it how to PROPERLY employ past progressive, because this view is definitely dissecting every nuance of action and telling the reader that every action is huge and significant, in the moment.

 

Thank you for the post @Gary Wed
So out of all this discussion, I get the impression that as long as the reader understands your text and that text is impactful, you have, in a way, succeeded. Grammar is important as a baseline for understanding, but not as strict as we may think, at least not in fiction writing.

I had a conversation with my brother, who said something like this: Spoken language sometimes breaks grammar in some ways. The narrator of stories can be viewed as a character who is uttering dialogue, hence breaking grammar in narration is not an ultimate crime, as long as people understand the end result.

I wonder what others think about this? For me, it helps me relax with my grammar anxiety a little. But still, yes, grammar is important, of course.

 

Personally, I have no respect for any narrator (that entity most influencing the narration) who isn't real. Otherwise known as author's voice, insofar as the author has no business in my story. To me, that narrator is somebody. Always. In 1st person it's obvious. In close limited 3rd it ought to be obvious (the viewpoint character). In omniscient forms it ought to be obvious. Somebody is telling this story, and the clearer we writers are about who that might best be, the faster we will develop a voice that fits the work. Or not, in which case it's an author who somehow imagines that they belong there, which is unfortunately usually the case.

On the other hand, imagine any character in control, the grandfather in the sky in omniscience, the rogue cowboy in limited 3rd, the bedraggled housewife in 1st person. Are they writers? Well, possibly, but not likely. In fact, judging from what I have read from the normal Joe on the street, they're hard pressed to put a decent sentence together. This implies that what that actor might put down in print is not going to be readable narration, just like what comes out of their mouth is not likely to be good dialogue. People think, write and speak in rambling, unprofessional forms. It's up a writer to make that accessible.

This means that fiction writers can get away with a lot, but they are still the authority on a whole different skill: being able to deliver something readable to the reader. I am better at writing than the grandfather in the sky, the cowboy in the saddle and the housewife getting the kids off to school. I mean to say, a lot better, and it ought to show in the dialogue I write, that narrative I attribute to someone else, and even the tiniest details of grammar. All of that is why it's called art. The English teacher can't do it. The Joe on the street can't do it. Writers are special.