Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    An AI-Driven Work Force
    AI and Microcredentials
Sign In
Lingua Franca-Circular Icon

Lingua Franca

Language and writing in academe.

The Fictional Possessives-With-Gerunds Rule

By Geoffrey K. Pullum March 1, 2018
hwfowler2
H.W. Fowler at home on Guernsey (Channel Islands)

Oh, dear. It had to happen sooner or later: a direct clash with Chronicle editorial authority over a point of 19th-century prescriptive grammar. My

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

hwfowler2
H.W. Fowler at home on Guernsey (Channel Islands)

Oh, dear. It had to happen sooner or later: a direct clash with Chronicle editorial authority over a point of 19th-century prescriptive grammar. My post on Monday included the phrase “without it inevitably dying"; do you see the point that provoked the editorial intervention?

Our esteemed editor, Heidi Landecker, who has saved me from a thousand blunders in the past, demurred. Her job description requires her to follow The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage scrupulously. And here is what that revered text says under the (mistaken) heading “participles as nouns":

participles as nouns. Beware of a present participle (the ing form of a verb) when it directly follows a noun or a pronoun. Look twice at the meaning of the phrase, because the participle often plays the role of a noun in such a sentence. And when that happens, the previous word should be possessive (his, her, their, Ms. Lamm’s). Some examples: The teachers complained about the principal’s missing the meeting. (It was the missing they complained about, not the principal. Thus the possessive.) The doctors advise against pregnant women’s drinking. (Their advice is against drinking, not against women: so it is not against pregnant women drinking.) Sometimes a sentence works either way: Terry watched the biplane landing and Terry watched the biplane’s landing mean roughly the same thing. And sometimes the change to a possessive is awkward, and the sentence is best rephrased slightly. Thus:
  • To be avoided: The police tried to prevent him jumping.
  • Corrected but stilted: The police tried to prevent his jumping.
  • Corrected and tidier: The police tried to prevent him from jumping.

king’s English

The traditional literature lying behind this confused and indecisive usage advice is a morass. If I were to just summarize the long and difficult sections headed “PARTICIPLE AND GERUND,” “PARTICIPLES,” and “THE GERUND” in The King’s English by H.W. and F.G. Fowler (1906), it would take thousands of words, and you would not thank me. In essence, the Fowler brothers are struggling to preserve the distinction between gerunds and present participles found in Latin but not in English. Latin amare “to love” has the gerund form amandum and the present-participle form amans, but English love has just the form loving (The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language calls it the gerund-participle).

ADVERTISEMENT

The Fowlers fret about “abandoning the gerund"; they want writers in English to show clearly when Latin would use the gerund rather than the present participle, by marking the subject with the genitive (or “possessive”) suffix ’s . They know that doing this would often make a sentence worse rather than better (consider without there being any sign of it, for example), but they do not relent; they say: “many types of sentence ... will have to be completely changed if the gerund is to be recognizable.” Formal signaling of the gerund/participle distinction ranks above expert writers’ preferences and well-established usage; sentences must be “completely changed.”

Their own examples give ample evidence of the frequency of the construction that the New York Times Manual tries to discourage. The magisterial entry “possessive with gerund” in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (1994; required reading) points out that some Victorian writers freely vacillate between the two constructions within a single short text; for example, Lewis Carroll wrote a letter on March 11, 1867, with in hopes of his being able to join me at one point and the music prevented any of it being heard at another.

J. Lesslie Hall gathered further data rebutting the Fowlers (English Usage, 1917) and Otto Jespersen amassed still more (Society for Pure English Tract 25, 1926). It is undeniable: Genitive and nongenitive subjects of gerund-participles have been in free alternation for centuries.

Yet when two quirky Edwardian grammar grouches in Guernsey decide to start dinging established writers for writing stop it happening instead of stop its happening, etc., the whole early-20th-century education system in America buys their nonsense, treating it as a rule to be taught in schools and enforced by copy editors a century later. Whatever happened to American independence?

You can look back at my post on Monday to see which way the dispute about without it(s) inevitably dying  was resolved. But a fictive rule invented by a couple of English curmudgeons 110 years ago should not have taken up any of our editor-vs.-author arm-wrestling time at all.

Especially since I had a battle over this topic back in June 2002. Stanley Fish used the putative rule here in The Chronicle as the basis for attributing “grammatical crimes” to an impromptu oral remark by Larry Summers (then president of Harvard). And I published a letter in The Chronicle (now sadly lost to history) lamenting the error of Fish’s grammar nitpicking.

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

Photo illustration showing Santa Ono seated, places small in the corner of a dark space
'Unrelentingly Sad'
Santa Ono Wanted a Presidency. He Became a Pariah.
Illustration of a rushing crowd carrying HSI letters
Seeking precedent
Funding for Hispanic-Serving Institutions Is Discriminatory and Unconstitutional, Lawsuit Argues
Photo-based illustration of scissors cutting through paper that is a photo of an idyllic liberal arts college campus on one side and money on the other
Finance
Small Colleges Are Banding Together Against a Higher Endowment Tax. This Is Why.
Pano Kanelos, founding president of the U. of Austin.
Q&A
One Year In, What Has ‘the Anti-Harvard’ University Accomplished?

From The Review

Photo- and type-based illustration depicting the acronym AAUP with the second A as the arrow of a compass and facing not north but southeast.
The Review | Essay
The Unraveling of the AAUP
By Matthew W. Finkin
Photo-based illustration of the Capitol building dome propped on a stick attached to a string, like a trap.
The Review | Opinion
Colleges Can’t Trust the Federal Government. What Now?
By Brian Rosenberg
Illustration of an unequal sign in black on a white background
The Review | Essay
What Is Replacing DEI? Racism.
By Richard Amesbury

Upcoming Events

Plain_Acuity_DurableSkills_VF.png
Why Employers Value ‘Durable’ Skills
Warwick_Leadership_Javi.png
University Transformation: a Global Leadership Perspective
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin