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

Popular posts from this blog

commas - Does this sentence have too many subjunctives?

verbs - "Baby is creeping" vs. "baby is crawling" in AmE

time - English notation for hour, minutes and seconds

etymology - Origin of "s--t eating grin"

grammatical number - Use of lone apostrophe for plural?

etymology - Where does the phrase "doctored" originate?

single word requests - What do you call hypothetical inhabitants living on the Moon?