Present participle
I read the discussion of Gerunds in the Reference section, but I'm still unclear on certain "frases verbales". In Spanish, I usually use infinitives where English would employ gerunds, but I've encountered some exceptions. In the article on Perífrasis Verbal in the Spanish version of Wikipedia, I see "permanecer corriendo" given as an example, and my Oxford Spanish Dictionary uses "goza viendo a su nieto jugar". Are these examples fundamentally different from a construction like "Evité comer el bróculi." ?
3 Answers
As samdie said, a Spanish "gerundio" can function as an adverb to indicate the way in which the person remained. In other words, if a verb -such as "viendo" in your second sentence- is used to indicate how the action of the main verb (ie. "goza") takes place, the verb acts like an adverb, and you must use the Spanish "gerund".
Do not translate from English to Spanish; these one-to-one type of rules are bound to fail sooner or later, especially if one is not clear about his own grammar, like the difference between gerund and present participle.
Evité comer el brócoli" is another story. It is simply a transitive verb and a direct object. You can say "Evité algo", where "algo" is the object, but instead of a noun you can use most of the time an infinitive instead, so you say "Evité comer..."
Evité comer el brócoli viendo como los demás se lo comían.
I can see 'corriendo' as describing how one remains, but "viendo a su nieto jugar" to me is a noun phrase serving as a direct object: it tells what he or she enjoys, not how, when, where, why, etc. Perhaps describing grammatical functions across languages can be as treacherous as translating.
Incidentally, in The Philosophy of Language, Jespersen discusses how in English there's a slight pause before an adverbial accusative that doesn't occur with an accusative object because the latter is a little more closely related to the verb than the former. I expect that there's no corresponding phonetic indicator in Spanish.
"permanecer corriendo" / "goza viendo a su nieto jugar
"comiendo" & "viendo" are present participles used as adverbs.
