"you saying" vs "your saying"(Usage Disputes)
In "You saying you're sorry alters the case", the subject of "alters" is not "you", since the verb is singular. Fowler called this construction the "fused participle", and recommended "Your saying..." instead. The fused participle *can* lead to ambiguity: in _Woe is I_ (Grosset/Putnam, 1996, ISBN 0-399-14196-0), Patricia T. O'Conner contrasts the sentences "Basil dislikes that woman's wearing shorts" and "Basil dislikes that woman wearing shorts": "Both are correct, but they mean different things. In the first example, Basil dislikes shorts on the woman. In the second, he dislikes the woman herself. The lesson? Lighten up, Basil!" Other commentators have been less critical of the fused participle than Fowler. Jespersen traced the construction as the last in a series of developments where gerunds, which originally functioned strictly as nouns, have taken on more and more verb-like properties ("the showing of mercy" => "showing of mercy" => "showing mercy"). Partridge defends the construction by citing lexical noun-plus-gerund compounds. In most of these (e.g., "time-sharing"), the noun functions as the object of the gerund, but in some recent compounds (e.g., "machine learning"), it functions as the subject.
This is a temporary page for the development of aue FAQ material and the testing of scripts.
Please do not bookmark this page.