Possessive Gerunds

Hey guys, I'm Alex. Thanks for clicking and welcome to this lesson on possessive gerunds.

So I have five sentences on the board. I would like you to look at them and tell me if you

can identify what is wrong with some of these sentences or all of them. Maybe some of them

are okay. Okay, so the first sentence says, "I appreciate you coming here." The second

one says, "He resents Mary being promoted." Third one says, "I am tired of Miguel complaining."

Fourth one says, "I need to talk to you about you writing." And the last one, "Her dancing

is beautiful." So as you can notice, today's lesson is on possessives and possessive gerunds.

Now remember, a gerund is basically a verb that acts like a noun. It's a verb plus -ing

and it's a thing. It acts like a noun. So the first one, "I appreciate you coming here."

Now, what this needs, you have to find the gerund first. So the gerund, the -ing verb,

is this, right? "I appreciate you coming." Coming is the gerund. Now, what you have to

understand here is try and think about this logically. What do you appreciate? Okay, here

you have, "I appreciate you," and you have "coming here." Are you appreciating the person

or are you appreciating the action? Well, in this situation, you're more appreciating

the action of the person coming there. So you don't say, "I appreciate you coming here."

You say, "I appreciate your, your coming here." Okay? And I'm just going to change my marker

very quickly, guys. We'll go with black. Okay, so, "I appreciate your coming here," because

you came, so I appreciate your coming here. The second one, "He resents Mary being promoted."

Again, he doesn't resent Mary. He resents her being promoted. So what you're supposed

to do in this situation is, "He resents Mary's being promoted." Her being promoted is what

he resents. He resents the action, not the person. And again, the gerund is -ing. The

next one says, "I am tired of Miguel complaining." Now, here you have Miguel. He's the object

here and you have the gerund, which is complaining. So again, "I am not tired of Miguel. I am

tired of his actions." So, "I am tired of Miguel's complaining." Possessive, apostrophe

S. Fourth one, "I need to talk to you about you

writing." I don't need to talk to you about you. I need to talk to you about the writing

that you do. So, writing here is the gerund. To make it possessive, "your." "I need to

talk to you about your writing." The writing belongs to you. It's your action.

And finally, we have, "Her dancing is beautiful." Is there anything wrong with this sentence?

Do we have a gerund? Yep, the gerund is here. And do we have a possessive? Yep, "her." "Her

dancing." So, this can be Maria's dancing or Marta's dancing or Lucy's dancing, whatever

it is. Okay, guys. So, just as a reminder, grammatically,

these are correct sentences. In speaking, in conversation, native speakers themselves make

this mistake. They do say, "I appreciate you coming here." Or, "He resents Mary being promoted."

Grammatically, this is what you should be doing, what you should be saying. So, if you

want to test your understanding of possessive gerunds, check out the quiz on www.engvid.com.

Good luck, guys. Take care.