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The network of English -ing forms covers a broad range of interrelated constructions, ranging from fully clausal forms such as the present participle (1), over hybrid constructions as the verbal gerund (VG) (2), to fully nominal forms like the nominal gerund (NG) (3). (1) She'd spread her arms out wide, twirling her hands a bit. (COCA) (2) He looked forward to having her all to himself in the big city. (COCA) (3) I traveled to Monterey to oversee the unloading of our goods off a Yankee ship. (COCA) The research on clausal -ing forms is extensive, with recent discussions zooming in on whether or not gerunds and present participles should be conflated into one grammatical category (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 82; Aarts 2007; De Smet 2010). The particular position occupied by nominal gerunds remains underresearched, however: although they are derived by means of the same suffix and thus exhibit formal ties to the productive schema of -ing forms (cf. De Smet 2008 and Fonteyn 2016 on the diachronic development of VGs out of NGs), they are mainly considered as belonging to a wider network of deverbal (action) nominalizations. As such, the NG represents a blind spot in our knowledge of the complex network of English -ing forms. This paper wishes to fill this gap by providing a quantitative assessment of the paradigmatic relations that exist between Present-day English NGs and VGs. By means of a hierarchical configural frequency analysis (Gries 2008; Hilpert 2009) of 800 NGs and 800 VGs from BNC and COCA, I identify clusters of features that are unique to either nominal or verbal gerunds, as well as possible zones of overlap between them. A distinctive collexeme analysis (Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004), then, provides a token-level perspective on variation between NGs and VGs. Firstly, NGs are shown to behave quite uniformly, with prototypical instances occurring in core clausal functions, actual mental spaces (cf. Fauconnier 1985) and without coreferential subject, as in (3). The class of VGs, in contrast, is fairly heterogeneous, lacking a clear prototype. It encompasses uses in peripheral clausal slots, virtual mental spaces and with subject control, as in (2), as well as uses that perfectly fit the NG prototype, as in (4). (4) Building the new reactors is expected to cost about $1,500 per kilowatt of capacity. (COCA) It is in those latter cases that functional interchangeability between NGs and VGs should, in theory, be possible. Yet, at the micro-level, the collexeme analysis reveals that there is hardly any overlap in the types of verbs NGs and VGs typically derive from, as the formation of NGs is heavily constrained by blocking effects from other nominalization patterns. Thus, despite the functional overlap at a higher-order level, NGs are only rarely viewed as suitable alternatives for a VG construction at the micro-level. The present findings, I will argue, can pave the way for a better understanding of the different levels at which paradigmatic relations operate. References Aarts, B. 2007. Syntactic Gradience. The nature of grammatical indeterminacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. De Smet, H. 2008. Functional motivations in the development of nominal and verbal gerunds in Middle and Early Modern English. English Language and Linguistics 12: 55–102. De Smet, H. 2010. English -ing-clauses and their problems: The structure of grammatical categories. Linguistics 48, 1153–1193. Fauconnier, G. 1985. Mental spaces. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fonteyn, L. 2016. Categoriality in Language Change. The case of the English gerund. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Linguistics, University of Leuven. Gries, Stefan Th. 2008. Statistik für Sprachwissenschaftler. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Gries, S. Th. & A. Stefanowitsch. 2004. Extending collostructional analysis. A corpusbased perspective on ‘alternations’. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9(1): 97–129. Hilpert, M. 2009. The German mit-predicative construction. Constructions and Frames 1(1): 29–55. Huddleston, R. & G. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.