Helping others is a good habit. Which part of speech is "Helping" & "others" here? [duplicate]

Solution 1:

In the example "Helping others is a good habit", "helping" is a verb and not a noun. Since "helping others" is the subject of the sentence, it is a noun phrase, and ordinarily the head of a noun phrase is a noun, but not always. Consider the homily "To err is human", where the subject noun phrase "to err" doesn't contain any noun.

So from the fact that "helping others" is a subject, from the fact that it is a noun phrase, we can't conclude that "helping" is a noun. It might be, it probably is, but maybe not.

If we look within the subject noun phrase, "helping" appears to be a verb, not a noun. It can be modified by an adverb, but not by an adjective: "Openly helping others is a good habit", *"Open helping others is a good habit". Nouns can be modified by adjectives but not adverbs, so this indicates that "helping" is a verb.

Nouns take preceding articles (to form a noun phrase), but verbs don't. Applying this as a test, we see that "helping" in the example must not be a noun: *"The helping others is a good habit."

However, "helping" could also be a noun, since there is a suffix "-ing" that forms nouns from verbs. "Helping" as a noun is a little awkward, but other verbs converted to nouns with this suffix are okay. However, in the example, "helping" cannot be a noun, because it has a direct object, "others". Verbs take direct objects but nouns don't. (Logical direct objects after a noun have to be converted to prepositional phrases with "of".)