ATEG users,
 
     Ed Vavra's question about whether to use "his" or "him" before the
constituent "driving our car" is one earlier grammarians have explored.
Recall that Jespersen includes similar constructions in  his discussion of
"ing" nouns.  If you haven't referred to his text recently, he explains that
the subject of the "ing," like that of any verbal noun--for instance Caesar's
conquests, Max's explanations--is usually put in genitive case.
     But, Jespersen says, "a variety of circumstances" have led writers to
choose not to do so.  He gives examples from Thackeray ("When we talk of this
man or that woman being no longer the same person"), Austen, Dickens, among
others, to illustrate his point.  These examples, he continues,  represent
"cases where for some reason or other it is impossible to use the genitive
case, but that it is also found where no such reason could be adduced."
 
     Curme, too, raises a couple of points that relate to the "him driving"
sentence.
1) He notes we "regularly use" the object form as subject of the gerund when
the subject is emphatic:  "She was proud of HIM doing it." or  "I was
frightened by the thought of HIM driving the car."  Perhaps Ed Vavra's
student writer, too, heard the word "him" emphasized as she wrote her
sentence, although she chose to place the gerund construction in the subject
slot rather than in the object of preposition slot.  Although our students
may not do so, Curme does make a contrast between "popular speech" and
"literary language":  in "literary language," the gerund with possessive
pronoun is the usual construction.
 
2) Curme also notes that the gerund construction is affected by the fact that
some words lack s-genitive forms in current English.  Thus, writers use the
object form: Thackeray's "I am not surprised at young or old falling in love
with her."
 
3) And there is no clear form for the possessive referring to a female.  HER
is either a personal pronoun OR a possessive. So this version of the
student's sentence is less attention-grabbing than the original:  Her driving
the car frightens me.  It may be possible, too,that just such an example led
the student writer to generalize and thus write the version that prompted our
discussion.
 
Now, are we going to hear more from Ed?
 
Janet