User talk:Tony1/Noun plus -ing

I'm a little unhappy about the clarity with which this neologism is described, but I doubt I could do any better, because my heart is just not in to it. Sometimes it is necessary to hang clauses at the end of statements, attached to particular phrases. This construction often provides an alternative ordering which could render some words less available for clause and phrase construction if it were ruled out.

Are there any statistics about whether this form of usage is more or less comprehensible in the same amount of time as the alternatives suggested? 76.254.65.110 (talk) 23:21, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Can you log in, please? Tony (talk) 01:14, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, I choose to be anonymous for a reason. I don't want my poor opinion of a tiny fragment of your very important work to come between what I believe to be our otherwise solid respect for each other. 76.254.65.110 (talk) 13:49, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Your poor opinion won't do that. I find it hard to take anon comments as seriously. Tony (talk) 22:39, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

When is Noun+ V-ing bad style and why?

I think this essay needs to explain better why (and hence also when) the construction is bad style and when it isn't.·Maunus·ƛ· 15:16, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

I agree. Tony (talk) 22:39, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

This is an issue more of style than grammar. It reflects the tendency towards the use of informal constructs in a formal context. The Yowser (talk) 12:07, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

No one seems to be able to define or analyse the construction; even systemic functional linguists I've asked. My own suspicion is that noun + -ing is the result of some kind of collision of two different grammatical constructions over the past two centuries or so—or at least the extension of one into a most uncomfortable area. I haven't thought it through properly, and would like to be able to explain the boundary between smooth and ugly uses of noun + -ing. Jane Austen uses it occasionally, in ways that work well; so do other authors. We could hardly object to "See the birds flying south." However, the construction is clearly unsatisfactory in many contexts (see the tutorial examples; don't you agree?). Tony (talk) 12:43, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

Characters of Carnivàle example

"Season 2 concludes with Ben setting out to confront Brother Justin in California" could be reformulated as "Season 2 concludes as Ben sets out to confront Brother Justin in California." Just a thought. Imzadi 1979 → 05:45, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Much better; thank you! Tony (talk) 06:35, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

You're quite welcome. Imzadi 1979 → 08:02, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Present participle

Although your exercises generally read well in the corrected form, I object to the entire concept of Noun plus -ing. These are not nouns + (something disagreeable). They are verb forms known as the present participle. Examples — being, running, walking, reading. They describe an ongoing action. --Greenmaven (talk) 04:57, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

This is extraordinary, Tony.

Greenmaven is on the right track, but he's slightly off. They are verb forms known as "gerunds". Not that this matters much; because, as The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language convincingly argues, gerunds are indistinguishable from present participles, and thus whatever are traditionally called either gerunds or present participles are better considered "gerund-participles", ugly mouthful though that is.

Which is not to say that all verby things ending "-ing" are verbs. There are adjectives ("participial adjectives") and even prepositions that seem more or less "verby" and end with "-ing". But those in your examples are verbs.

And so, you say, a string of the kind you discuss

is often grammatically ambiguous, where the "-ing" phrase could either qualify the noun (adjectival) or be part of a possessive construction in which the noun "owns" the action.

Urgh, no. What it does is a matter of function. "Adjectival" is a matter of category. By "qualify" I think you mean "modify". Your scare quotes around "owns" suggest that you too realize that "possessive" is daft as a would-be synonym of "genitive": the great majority of use of genitives has nothing to do with possession. (My phone, yes; but my birth, my headache, my employment, my salary, my neurosis, my height, my toes, my electricity consumption, no.)

"I object to him being there"

-- is utterly idiomatic and clear. Unless perhaps you consider the possibility of the (extraordinarily marked) "I object to him [, myself] being there"; but this would require a dramatic pause after "him" and it would be a most unlikely alternative to "When I'm there I object to him" (whose utterance is itself implausible because if one objects to somebody only when one is in a given place it's usually for a specified reason: "When I'm there I object to his rudeness to the waiters").

So, putting aside alternative readings that are highly unlikely, "him being there" is a non-finite subordinate clause that's the complement of the preposition "to", the entire preposition phrase being the complement of the verb "object". And unambiguously so.

And no, the complements of prepositions aren't limited to noun phrases. (Indeed, prepositions don't necessarily have any complements at all.) That argument was over a long time ago (other of course, than among the nitwits who write prescriptive grammars or the grammatical misinformation pandemic in dictionaries).

"The archaeological finds included silver pendants of females bearing drinking horns." Here, "bearing drinking horns" looks like some kind of adjectival phrase, qualifying females.

I'm not sure what an "adjectival phrase" is, but it certainly doesn't look like an adjective phrase. "Drinking horns" is probably best thought of as a compound noun. This compound noun (or if you insist, this noun phrase headed by "horns") is the object of the verb "bearing". And the whole verb phrase "bearing drinking horns" is a modifier of "females". (There's nothing unusual about postnominal modifiers. Preposition phrases appear here too: "the house on the hill".)

Grammatically, this "archaeological finds" sentence too seems impeccable to me. Well, if you want to nitpick, "of" is potentially ambiguous: are these pendants decorated with females, or pendants that had belonged to females? But the latter reading would be perverse. (Lexically, I'm not so enthusiastic. "Of" isn't disastrously ambiguous, but it's unclear all the same. And I'd only use "females" if the depictions were of both (i) girls too young to be called women and (ii) women too old to be called girls.)

I could go on. But . . . salaried work to be done. -- Hoary (talk) 10:53, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

• Hoary, you and I use different grammatical systems (in concept and terminology). To take one issue: "The archaeological finds included silver pendants of females bearing drinking horns." That's an attributive process involving two nominal groups: "the archaeological finds" and "silver pendants of females bearing drinking horns". The two heads are "finds" and "pendants", with pre- and post-qualification hanging off them. I don't mind that one; I do mind "I object to him being there". Tony (talk) 12:09, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

• No objection to any of that (although I don't know what's meant by "attributive process"), but are you saying that the word "bearing" within this sentence is a noun plus an ing suffix? Or are you saying that the ing suffix makes it a noun? Or something else? -- Hoary (talk) 14:35, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses) and three "shows"

Cold this be a better alternative to the solution shown for "Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses)"? This change seems to make a more powerful sentence than the current solution, and it eliminates both "noun plus -ing" phrases.

Taylor made a point to avoid the use of profanity, in response to claims that he relied on it.

Secondly, near the top of the article is the sentence, "Hit the three 'shows' at the right ..." It this sentence out of date, or are the three "shows" still there? Zcarstvnz (talk) 13:28, 24 November 2018 (UTC)