![]() In every case, you can avoid controversy by changing the pronoun or noun into a possessive. Naturally, not every sentence in this structure involves the word “you” or “your.” Almost any noun or pronoun can come into play: “He would not object to them trying” fuses the participle “trying” with the pronoun “them.” ![]() If this is truly a problem, as some say it is, there’s an easy way to fix it: Change “you” to “your.” With the added R, the noun “you” becomes the modifier “your.” Once it’s a modifier, there’s no longer any controversy about which word is the object of your appreciation: It’s “driving.” Sometimes this form is called the “possessive with gerund,” because “your” is possessive and “driving” is a gerund, which is the -ing form of a verb when it’s used as a noun. Grammar expert June Casagrande writes you don’t need to stress about commas in certain situations when you can just them or forget them. Opinion A Word, Please: Seven times commas are optional They cannot parse it, they cannot explain it.” “From the middle of the 18th century to the present time,” writes Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, “grammarians and other commentators have been baffled by the construction. From a standpoint of pure grammar, it’s nonsensical. The participle “driving” is just kind of fused to “you” with no clear role. So “driving” is the true object of the verb “appreciate.” Yet the first word after “appreciate” isn’t “driving.” It’s “you.” Between the verb and its true object, there’s another word - “you” - just sitting there with no grammatical job to do. So when you say, “I saw you working,” you get a grammatical sentence with a verb (saw), followed by its object (you), followed by a modifier of that object (working).īut in “I appreciate you driving him home,” the object of the verb “appreciate” isn’t really “you.” You’re not saying, “I appreciate you as a person” or “I appreciate that you exist.” It’s the driving that you really appreciate. The participle in “you working” has the same role, even though it comes after the noun. In all these examples, a verb participle is modifying a noun, meaning it’s working like an adjective. It may seem odd to classify a verb form as an adjective, but we use verb participles this way all the time: a cooking class, a walking stick, your thinking cap, growing pains, a hiking excursion. The next word, “working,” is a verb participle functioning as a modifier - essentially an adjective. In “I saw you working hard,” the object of the verb “saw” is “you.” I saw you. But to understand how that changes the grammar, you need to zoom in on how all the parts work together in the sentence. The fused participle concept comes up most often in the sentence: “I appreciate you taking the time to meet with me.” Critics of this form say it should be: “I appreciate your taking the time to meet with me.” And that one-letter variation, “your” replacing “you,” makes all the difference in the world.
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