Hey guys, I'm Alex. Thanks for clicking and welcome to this lesson on possessive gerunds.
So I have five sentences on the board. I would like you to look at them and tell me if you
can identify what is wrong with some of these sentences or all of them. Maybe some of them
are okay. Okay, so the first sentence says, "I appreciate you coming here." The second
one says, "He resents Mary being promoted." Third one says, "I am tired of Miguel complaining."
Fourth one says, "I need to talk to you about you writing." And the last one, "Her dancing
is beautiful." So as you can notice, today's lesson is on possessives and possessive gerunds.
Now remember, a gerund is basically a verb that acts like a noun. It's a verb plus -ing
and it's a thing. It acts like a noun. So the first one, "I appreciate you coming here."
Now, what this needs, you have to find the gerund first. So the gerund, the -ing verb,
is this, right? "I appreciate you coming." Coming is the gerund. Now, what you have to
understand here is try and think about this logically. What do you appreciate? Okay, here
you have, "I appreciate you," and you have "coming here." Are you appreciating the person
or are you appreciating the action? Well, in this situation, you're more appreciating
the action of the person coming there. So you don't say, "I appreciate you coming here."
You say, "I appreciate your, your coming here." Okay? And I'm just going to change my marker
very quickly, guys. We'll go with black. Okay, so, "I appreciate your coming here," because
you came, so I appreciate your coming here. The second one, "He resents Mary being promoted."
Again, he doesn't resent Mary. He resents her being promoted. So what you're supposed
to do in this situation is, "He resents Mary's being promoted." Her being promoted is what
he resents. He resents the action, not the person. And again, the gerund is -ing. The
next one says, "I am tired of Miguel complaining." Now, here you have Miguel. He's the object
here and you have the gerund, which is complaining. So again, "I am not tired of Miguel. I am
tired of his actions." So, "I am tired of Miguel's complaining." Possessive, apostrophe
S. Fourth one, "I need to talk to you about you
writing." I don't need to talk to you about you. I need to talk to you about the writing
that you do. So, writing here is the gerund. To make it possessive, "your." "I need to
talk to you about your writing." The writing belongs to you. It's your action.
And finally, we have, "Her dancing is beautiful." Is there anything wrong with this sentence?
Do we have a gerund? Yep, the gerund is here. And do we have a possessive? Yep, "her." "Her
dancing." So, this can be Maria's dancing or Marta's dancing or Lucy's dancing, whatever
it is. Okay, guys. So, just as a reminder, grammatically,
these are correct sentences. In speaking, in conversation, native speakers themselves make
this mistake. They do say, "I appreciate you coming here." Or, "He resents Mary being promoted."
Grammatically, this is what you should be doing, what you should be saying. So, if you
want to test your understanding of possessive gerunds, check out the quiz on www.engvid.com.
Good luck, guys. Take care.