"incorrect" possessive pronouns

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Oct 21, 2004, at 1:37 PM, Larry Horn wrote:

> At 7:55 AM -0500 10/21/04, Patti J. Kurtz wrote:
>> I talked to a prof yesterday who said she had a student who used (her
>> words "possessives incorrectly with gerunds" in a paper.  I tried to
>> get
>> her to give me an example, and the only thing she could come up with
>> was
>> to say the student used "me" instead of "my" with a gerund acting as
>> a noun.
>>
>> I'm assuming something like "me writing" instead of "my writing."
>
> Yes, but more likely in a context like "He objected to me writing
> that letter" with an ACC-ing construction in place of the
> prescriptively correct "POSS-ing" "He objected to my writing the
> letter".  Just a guess, based on the fact that this is a standard
> prescriptivist bugaboo.

check out the sane and scholarly discussion of the issue in MWDEU,
under "possessive with gerund" (where you will learn that the earliest
commentators on NP+gerund constructions rejected the *possessive*
versions, that Fowler insisted on the possessive, and that Jespersen
wrote a tract against Fowler on this very issue).  MWDEU also lists
some cases where the possessive is virtually barred (Flannery O'Connor:
...to find out what is responsible for my feet swelling), though they
missed my favorite, the expletive pronoun "there", which (as David
Perlmutter pointed out decades out) doesn't *have* a possessive, so you
really have to say "He objected to there being no fishforks on the
table".

to think of the distinction as merely a choice between marking the
subject of a gerund with a possessive/genitive (POSS-ing) or an
accusative/unmarked form (ACC-ing) doesn't really do justice to the
matter, though.  as Rob Malouf argues in several places (see esp. his
2000 book, Mixed Categories in the Hierarchical Lexicon), the two have
different structures/functions; POSS-ing NPs are pretty much just NPs
in their external syntax, but ACC-ing NPs act externally a lot like
(nonfinite) clauses.

arnold