'taking off' and 'landing'. nouns or verbs?

English grammar and usage issues

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ecott
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'taking off' and 'landing'. nouns or verbs?

Unread post by ecott »

I'm currently on a CELTA course and I need to teach a vocab lesson tomorrow on airport related vocab.

One of the activities is a gap-fill. In these contexts are these words verbs or nouns? I thought they were nouns from the dictionary definitions but I'm not sure:

When a plane is going up in the sky it is 'taking off'.

When a plane is coming down from the air it is 'landing'.

Any help would be much appreciated.
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odyssey
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Re: 'taking off' and 'landing'. nouns or verbs?

Unread post by odyssey »

ecott wrote: 20 Oct 2019, 13:31 I'm currently on a CELTA course and I need to teach a vocab lesson tomorrow on airport related vocab.

One of the activities is a gap-fill. In these contexts are these words verbs or nouns? I thought they were nouns from the dictionary definitions but I'm not sure:

When a plane is going up in the sky it is 'taking off'.

When a plane is coming down from the air it is 'landing'.

Any help would be much appreciated.
They are verbs, specifically MAIN VERBS (with the auxiliary or helping verb being "is").

It might help you to look at their "function" within the sentence. In this case, "going up" (verb) defines "taking off" (verb). You probably easily recognize "going up" as a verb. In direct definitions, we normally define a word with the same part of speech. I would be strange to define a noun with an adjective, or a verb with a noun :mrgreen:
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