Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2020 August 18

= August 18 =

Too possessive?
I occasionally come across phrases such as "there would be no question of the group's becoming involved in politics" rather than "there would be no question of the group becoming involved in politics" which latter sounds better to me. Is one more correct than the other? Or maybe the former is an outdated uasage?--Shantavira|feed me 08:29, 18 August 2020 (UTC)


 * They're both fine. They're both fully correct. (If you're really intent on discerning a difference in "correctness", then the former is "more correct" if you take seriously the witterings of some so-called "language experts" -- a term that doesn't encompass actual linguists.) Use whichever you prefer. -- Hoary (talk) 08:36, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
 * IIRC correctly from my Latin (too long ago to say) the first "becoming" would be a gerund (or verbal noun) and the second is a present participle.  Hence a possessive with the noun and not with the verb.--Phil Holmes (talk) 14:08, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
 * For more information, see Gerund. Deor (talk) 14:09, 18 August 2020 (UTC)


 * This is not Latin, it's English. As The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL) -- which wasn't published so long ago, whose relevant content I do remember correctly, and whose purchase I warmly recommend to anyone attempting to answer questions here about English grammar -- points out, for English, there is no sound reason to distinguish between the gerund and the present participle. Putting aside the gerund/participle (non-) distinction, in "the group's becoming involved in politics", I see no reason to believe that "becoming" is a noun. (For one thing, if it were a noun, it wouldn't be a proper noun or a pronoun; it would be a common noun. If it were a common noun, whether count or non-count, one would expect it to be able to take plain "the" as determiner. However, in my at least, *"the becoming involved in politics" is ungrammatical. Deverbal nouns ending "-ing" can take "the" -- e.g. "editing" within "the editing of Wikipedia articles" -- but "becoming" isn't one here.) -- Hoary (talk) 00:47, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Illustrative of the dual nature is that "becoming" can take an adjective, but also an adverb: "the group's recent becoming involved in politics", "the group's increasingly becoming involved in politics". --Lambiam 10:16, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Is "the group's recent becoming involved in politics" actually considered correct in any English variant? It sounds decidedly wrong to me. --Khajidha (talk) 11:08, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Then, presumably, you also have an issue with the phrases "his son's recent becoming a Marine" seen here and "Juliet Prowse's stylish dancing" not seen here (paywall). --Lambiam 15:06, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
 * The "becoming a Marine" example is another that I just cannot read in any way as correct. The "stylish dancing" seems perfectly normal. --Khajidha (talk) 15:25, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
 * There's no ambiguity involved for me. I've read that sentence over and over and there just isn't any reading of it that is correct in my dialect. --Khajidha (talk) 14:56, 19 August 2020 (UTC)


 * "If 'becoming' is a gerund (verbal noun) then it can take adjectives just like any other noun":, you're conflating two things.
 * "Teaching French satisfied him." "Teaching" is a verb. According to CGEL it's a gerund-participle; but if you want to call it a gerund, OK. It is not a noun, even though in some respects it may seem "nouny". We know it's a verb because it has an object, "French". It is of course normal for verbs to have NP objects. Nouns do not. ("Education" is a noun; we can't say *"Education French satisfied him.")
 * "The teaching of French satisfied him." (For me, this sounds somewhat pompous, but acceptable all the same.) "Teaching" is a noun. We know it's a noun because it takes a determiner. (Indeed, it requires one: if you simply drop the "The", the result is ungrammatical.) Nouns often take PP complements; the particular preposition depending on the noun (cf "education in French"). We know it's not the verb, because the verb teach can (and usually does) take an NP object: "He teaches French", not *"He teaches of French".
 * Jayron32, I'll concede that CGEL is expensive (even if bought second hand, as my copy was). But the same (primary) authors' A Student's Introduction to English Grammar (ISBN 0-521-61288-8) is very helpful, and comes at a very palatable price. -- Hoary (talk) 23:10, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Fine. You win.  If you're going to be an asshole about it, I don't need to participate.  I'm OK being corrected.  I'm not OK being patronized.  Learn the difference.  If I'm wrong, call me out on it and let me know where I made a mistake.  I'll self correct.  But there's no need to do what you did there.  Totally fucking uncalled for, and you're better than that.  -- Jayron 32 02:28, 20 August 2020 (UTC)


 * * "The group's recent becoming involved in politics is disturbing." Ungrammatical: the adjective recent can't modify the verb become (and there's nothing else that it could plausibly be doing there). We know that "becoming" is a verb because "become/became involved in XYZ" is entirely idiomatic; in other contexts, "becoming" can be a noun or imaginably an adjective, but neither nouns nor adjectives take AdjP complements.
 * * "The group's increasingly becoming involved in politics is disturbing." Ungrammatical. "Becoming" is a verb, "increasingly" is an adverb, adverbs can modify verbs; however, there just is no "slot" for an adverb here.
 * * "His son's recent becoming a Marine prompted a family celebration." Ungrammatical. "Becoming" is a verb here, because it has an NP complement; in other contexts, "becoming" can be a noun or imaginably an adjective, but neither nouns nor adjectives take NP complements.
 * "Juliet Prowse's stylish dancing thrilled all who witnessed it." Grammatical and idiomatic. "Dancing" is a noun here: you can substitute other (unambiguous) nouns (costume, attire, defence, soliloquy, peroration...).
 * -- Hoary (talk) 23:10, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
 * "Why is 'his recent becoming' ungrammatical?" – "Because 'becoming' is a verb here." – "How do we know it is a verb? – "Because it cannot take an adjective; take for instance the phrase 'his recent becoming': it is ungrammatical."
 * What about these uses: "his recently becoming a direct employee", "his recently becoming a 'world champion'", "his slowly becoming an integral part of the ward", "their increasingly becoming negative theologians", "their increasingly becoming objects of curiosity", "their increasingly becoming seen as necessities", are all ungrammatical because "there is just no slot for an adverb here"? --Lambiam 13:40, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Ummm... "his recent becoming" is not the same as "his recently becoming", so I'm not sure what you are trying to prove with those examples. --Khajidha (talk) 13:53, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
 * They are not the same. I argued that the fact you could qualify the gerundiple with either an adjective or a verb illustrated its dual noun/verb nature. While you merely said that "the group's recent becoming involved in politics" sounds wrong to you, Hoary's grammatically judgemental posting stated with apparently unquestionable certainty, as if informing us of an apodictic fact, that this is ungrammatical . The point of my contribution was to show that some authors have different grammatical judgements; and likewise with his judgement passed on "The group's increasingly becoming involved in politics is disturbing." --Lambiam 19:43, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Reading the material at the links provided, most of the examples linked to do seem ungrammatical. At best, a few of them are highly stilted. --Khajidha (talk) 13:59, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Well to your grammatical sensors this does sound ungrammatical, and if your mother tongue doesn't know a nominal verb form then there is no problem with me but you should not try and prove your point through a plump circular fallacy, as also Lambiam points to you. Some of us have no difficulty with the using of a verb form as if it were a noun, then there are several languages in Europe where you do this routinely, and there are books saying that this use is possible and grammatical in English. So please, have you got some more conclusive arguments than your personal feelings? 2003:F5:6F08:AF00:BD9C:D95E:7C63:1799 (talk) 19:20, 20 August 2020 (UTC) Marco PB
 * My posting (pointing out the circularity) was actually directly in response to Hoary's preceding posting. --Lambiam 19:43, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, I should have checked in a corpus (or at least said that I should have done so), and I should have made the "at least in my idiolect" disclaimer more than once. The IP's "with the using of a verb form" sounds perfectly fine to me, as does "with using a verb form". I'd say "using" is a (deverbal) noun in the former, a gerund-participle (and thus verb) in the latter. (More evidence is that -- for me -- "using" can be modified by "clear" and not "clearly" in the former, vice versa in the latter.) Attempted hybrids -- *"with using of a verb form", *"with the using a verb form" -- utterly fail (for me). And I have to concede that "his ADV becoming NP/AdjP" is growing on me: the Google Books examples above sound a lot more plausible than does ?"the group's increasingly becoming", and I confess that I don't know why. -- Hoary (talk) 02:11, 21 August 2020 (UTC)