Dear Rebecca,

Thanks for your reply to my conundrum concerning the sentence "I appreciate
your taking over as editor, Dave's taking over as Treasurer, and Michael's
taking over as webmaster." You say that "the gerund (poss. + -ing) signals
that the ENTIRE sentence is involved (subject + predicate), and not just the
subject or just the action. "

I come at it from a different direction, one that is, in fact, supported by
Ed's own presentation of the noun absolute in his KISS course. He says,
concerning those noun absolutes, that

"Their noun function is obscured, however, because the words can usually be
explained in another way. I must admit that it was a student who first made
me pay attention to the noun function of noun absolutes. The class was
discussing the sentence:

They watched the windmill spinning against the sky.

Someone had already analyzed "windmill" as the direct object of "watched"
and "spinning" as a gerundive modifying it, but one student wasn¹t
satisfied. The sentence, she insisted, doesn¹t really mean "We watched the
windmill": it means we watched the "windmill spinning": the noun absolute
functions as the direct object. Having read Jespersen on nexus, I wasn¹t
about to tell her that she was wrong. She wasn¹t. Note also how close the
construction is to the gerund plus subject--"windmill¹s spinning." The noun
absolute allows us to see the connection between "windmill" and "spinning"
as primary, and then to take the entire construction as the direct object of
"watched."

So, I would be inclined to revise the sentence: "I appreciate you taking
over as editor, Dave taking over as Treasurer, and Michael taking over as
webmaster."


Don

P.S. I want to apologize publicly, as I have already done privately, for
misspelling Ed's last name.