This master’s thesis contrasts the Russian gerund (the deepričastie form) and the Spanish non-periphrastic gerund from a morphosyntactic and semantic point of view. The base for the research is the converb, a non-finite verb form that expresses adverbial subordination. Based on this definition, we try to ascertain whether the Russian gerund and the Spanish non-periphrastic gerund can be considered a part of the aforementioned category. In the theoretical section, we focus on the problems of defining and classifying Russian and Spanish gerunds. Special attention is paid to morphosyntactic and semantic characteristics of the given forms, which also serve to illustrate their adverbial subordination. In the empirical section, we try to comprehensively analyze and contrast the gerunds, based on 110 representative examples taken from a parallel Russian-Spanish corpus. The main aim of this is to discover in which examples is the Russian gerund translated into the Spanish gerund and vice versa, in addition to researching the other linguistic means with which the forms are translated in case of mismatch, as well as the cause of the mismatch. Using contrastive analysis, we can conclude that the Russian gerund undoubtedly belongs to the category of converbs, while only the Spanish non-periphrastic gerund derived from the ablative case of the Latin gerund has an adverbial function and thus fits the definition of the converb. The Russian gerund and the Spanish non-periphrastic gerund share similar morphosyntactic and semantic properties. However, due to specific characteristics of the Russian and Spanish languages (e.g., the different expression of grammatical aspect and capability of expressing the subject), the two verb forms are not entirely the same, potentially obstructing a direct translation.
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