Friday, September 4, 2015

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.


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