The aim of this article is to analyze the functions of gerund in contemporary Portuguese. The analysis is based on the Intercorp parallel corpus.
The examinated language sample comes from the works of contemporary Portuguese and Brazilian literature. The analysis has various objectives: firstly, to find out the most frequent verbs appearing in the gerund form; secondly, to determine syntactic functions most often taken by the gerund;, thirdly, the most characterictic semantic types of circumstantial gerund and, last, the comparison of the relative frequency of simple and compound gerund.