By Possessives, Accusative

Hi, As far as I know , both possessive and accusative forms can be used after a number of adjectives followed by prepositions , e.g. be bored with , be happy about , be interested in , be keen on , be concerned about, be afraid of etc.The possessive forms ( our,your ,,,) are formal and the...

If you think about something, you are more engaged in cogitating about it than when you only think of it. The pronoun after the preposition (of/about) may be either in possessive (his, their, your, etc.) or accusative case (him, them, you, etc.). The former is more formal.

None of these names for cases applies much to Modern English; we have neither an accusative nor a dative case and many linguists might argue we do not even have a true genitive (just a "clitic s"). Nouns have an all-purpose "base case" and a possessive form. My dog is big/I see a dog. ...

Good day, all! Read through....the question is at the end. English cases, though no longer taught as such, are still somewhat present and remnants of the cases in Old English. During the time between say, 1300 and the present, we lost most of the inflections that were present before...

Paco, I too was taught the "one's doing" formulation in the sixties and have never stopped using it, and neither have any of my friends and family whom I consider careful speakers of English. I have also found it to be universally followed in American formal writing (anything from newspapers to...

Have we considered thoroughly enough the possibility that what is to blame for this conundrum is the poverty of terminology for talking about such structures. I mean, why should it have to be either a participle or a gerund? Just because textbooks don't use a term like "geriple" or...

Thanks, All. First, I am a native English speaker (from California, but now living in London). Second, in "We watched him cooking the dinner," "him" is clearly the intended object of "watched," and "cooking the dinner" is a participial phrase modifying "him." That is, "cooking" is not used...

Mr P In other words, #2 emphasises the 'whispering'; but in #1, the object of dislike is the whole picture: 'the-boy-whispering'. I would read the ING in #2 as a gerund, and the ING in #1 as a participle. (I'd be interested to know why a participle string shouldn't follow the object. In Latin...

...whether they just don't fuss about grammar... BrEs on the whole tend to take the Marlon Brando approach to fussing – 'What are you fussing about?' 'What have you got?' – but I'd say that this particular usage (object pronoun + ING) isn't among the more fussed-about. (Which is surprising, in...

OED The gerund still retains one feature of the verbal noun, namely, that of admitting of a preceding possessive case or possessive pronoun, as in "after John's behaving so strangely", "upon my readily granting it". In the literary language this construction is regularly retained with a pronoun,...