Why is "escaping" a participle here?

Question

The Cambridge Dictionary says:

In English, many past and present participles of verbs can be used as adjectives. Some of these examples may show the adjective use.

So there is no escaping from it: scientific language has to be tackled and mastered if scientific thought is to be followed.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

The negative approach is to defend it by showing that it represents one way of escaping a number of problems facing standard egalitarian justification.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Isn't escaping a gerund, however, in both the examples?

Answer 1

So there is no escaping from it: scientific language has to be tackled and mastered if scientific thought is to be followed.

"No escaping from it" is a what Huddleston & Pullum (2002) refer to as a Hybrid Construction. It is hybrid in the sense that it is headed by a gerund-participle verb "escaping" but it takes a pre-head dependent that is characteristic of an NP structure, which in this case is the determiner "no".

The negative approach is to defend it by showing that it represents one way of escaping a number of problems facing standard egalitarian justification.

In this case, "escaping" is also a verb in the form of gerund-participle. "Escaping a number of problems" is therefore a VP that functions as complement of "of".

In modern grammar, the distinction between gerund and present participle is discarded entirely. There are a lot of grammars that follow this, such as that of Huddleston & Pullum (2002) and that of Aarts (2014). Huddleston & Pullum (2002) use the compound term "gerund-participle" to replace them both.