grammar - Possessive + gerund + object pronoun
I'm reading The Great Gatsby and there's one part when Tom Buchanan is arguing by phone with George Wilson about a car, and Tom says the next:
Very well, then, I won't sell you the car at all ... I'm under no obligations to you at all ... and as for your bothering me about it at lunch time, I won't stand that at all!
the part:
[...] and as for your bothering me [...]
has a structure like:
possessive adjective + gerund + object pronoun
I had never seen such a construction, so my question is:
Is there something elided in the sentence, and what's the meaning of the sentence?
Thank you in advance.
Answer
In school I was taught that gerunds take a possessive pronoun and that's that. But it kind of makes sense if you consider that by definition a gerund is a present participle masquerading as a noun. If we substitute an actual noun, we might get something like, "your disturbance [of] me at lunchtime." The subjective "you" would never fit in this construct, and thinking of "bothering" as a noun should help make this rule clear.
Comments
Post a Comment