Possessive vs accusative case for nominalized clauses
Consider the following sentences:
- "She was against his joining the team."
- "She was against his joining of the team."
- "She was against him joining the team."
Instinctively, the first just sounds wrong to me. Thinking deeper about it though, I can't tell why it sounds wrong to me; "joining the team" should be able to act as an entire noun-phrase, and thus be able to be modified by a possessive pronoun.
The second one sounds acceptable to me though, as I have no problem nominalizing just "joining" and then modifying it with "of the team".
On the other hand, I have also been told that the third is ungrammatical, because in "him joining the team", him is the grammatical subject of the phrase, and as such should not be in the accusative case.
I'm curious to know whether there is a regular split, for instance whether one would be more acceptable in British English compared to American English, or whether there is another cause for this difference in opinion.
1 answer
verbal nouns and gerunds
This may be a case where the differences between verbal nouns and gerunds are causing some confusion. In most cases, they are somewhat interchangeable but it should be easier to differentiate in the following sentences.
Grammatical
- She was against his sudden joining of the team.
- She was against him suddenly joining the team. (Gerund)
Ungrammatical
- She was against his suddenly joining of the team.
- She was against him sudden joining the team.
Verbal nouns are treated as true nouns while gerunds have some properties of both verbs and nouns.
connotation
It’s also worth noting that the three phrasings have slightly different connotations.
- She was against his joining the team [his decision to join].
- She was against his joining of the team [how he joined].
- She was against him joining the team [that he is here].
Of the three, the 3rd sounds the most neutral, to me as a native speaker from America, while the other two emphasize the manner of his joining. Most likely because his hints at ownership, and therefore responsibility. I’d guess that you’ve heard the third option most often, as most people are not looking to assign blame (even subtly) in most day-to-day interactions.
Even as a native speaker, I needed to look this one up. It’s also possible that I, and many other English speakers, will readily accept forms of gerunds and noun phrases that are not by-the-book grammatical, but not eggregiously wrong.
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