In Pronouns^x, Gerunds^x

I cannot think of a context in which an educated speaker in the US would ever use anything other than a possessive with a gerund. (In the first example “The teacher disliked the child whispering …” “whispering” is used as a participle, not a gerund.) I have often been perplexed to see an...

maverick88, I accept "Despite my being thirsty I went on working", yes. Leaving out the "my" is of course possible and perhaps even preferable because of the "I" which appears quite soon after. Let's change the sentence so that the conjunction of "me" and "I" is not at issue. I accept...

Pieanne, Yes, I'd say it's in the same area of interest, namely "worth" -- same church, different pew maybe. The difference is that the complement is a pronoun in "I'm worth nothing" and it's a gerund phrase in expressions like "I'm worth treating with respect". In the case of the gerund,...

Mr. P., Could you reconsider whether the "for" in "I was worth X-ing for" is a required element of the idiom? I've been reading this thread with interest, and it occurs to me that the "for" is an artifact of the verb choice for X, not part of the idiom itself. The "for" may go with the verb it...

Hello Casi 1. 'First, a possessive pronoun (possP) modifies a present participle...' Mea culpa - of course 'my' modifies 'head'. 2. Second, redundancy is the reason adverbial clauses are reduced to adverbial phrases... It seems to me that the argument in this section starts from the...

Thank you for your kind words. "Kochira kozo", as they say in Japanese. There are a few points that I'd like to address. First, a possessive pronoun (possP) modifies a present participle: EX: my aching heart Linearly, it appears that 'my' modifies 'aching', but a non-linear approach has...

Hello Casi Hats off to your analysis! Very nice work indeed. Your notion of is something of an enigma. It is the most obviously dangly of structures, when it does dangle; yet its form is seemingly ambiguous. Again, hats off to your analysis! Some fine disentangling. MrP

Hello MrP History of English Gerunds (quoted from OED) The most notable development of the verbal nouns in form of -ing is its use as a gerund, i.e. a substantive with certain verbal functions, particularly those of being qualified by an adverb instead of an adjective, and of governing an...

Thumbs up! An excellent run-though of the distributional facts. There are two points, though, that I'd like to address: (1) the question of whether the ING phrase houses a gerund or a participle, and (2) 'psuedo-dangliness'. First, since a participle cannot be modified by a possessive pronoun;...

Hi, MountainHiker. Thank you for your comments, they have given me some new idea and before I begin a revision of my essay, would you please answer another important for me question? always trying to research your private life. I'm not exclude I can be mistaken. Your correction turns this...