Subject: When a gerundy-looking word isn’t a gerund
I might not have read the lead article in the business section of the July 4, 2009, New York Times, “Spinning the Web: PR in Silicon Valley,” had the first sentence not been “Brooke Hammerling (publicist) and Erin McKean (entrepreneur) are in a Sand Hill Road conference room, hashing out plans to unveil Ms. McKean’s new Web site, Wordnik.”
Erin is the CEO of Wordnik; she’s also a longtime friend of mine and a contributor to Copyediting. So I had to read the article, which I did find interesting. Most interesting to me (from my admittedly skewed perspective) was that the article contained the same punctuation error twice. It occurs in the following extracts; see whether you can spot it:
For new companies’ trying to get the word out, there’s a healthy measure of liberation in all of this. For publicists, the era of e-mail, blogs and Twitter has the potential to turn the entire idea of P.R. professionals as gatekeepers on its head.
Some business people say that because journalists would rather hear stories directly from the entrepreneurs who are genuinely excited about their companies — rather than from publicists’ faking excitement — the role of publicists becomes less crucial.
The problem is treating trying in the first extract and faking in the second one as if they were gerunds. They’re not. The present participle, the one that ends in -ing, is functioning as part of the present progressive in both cases. And in both cases, the relative pronoun and the helping verb are elided: “For new companies [that are] trying to get the word out”; “from publicists [who are] faking excitement.”
Misidentifying the participle as a gerund led to the mistake of adding an apostrophe to companies and publicists to make them possessive. What is a gerund? It’s an -ing participle acting as a noun, and there are two of them in the first sentence in this paragraph. (Some grammarians would call misidentifying and adding gerundives, not true gerunds. A gerund has to be modified by some kind of determiner or by a genitive or a possessive, and it can’t take an object. A gerundive follows a preposition and can take an object. The people who made up these rules would not have allowed an abomination like beginning the sentence with misidentifying to stand.)
An accurate use of the apostrophe can be found in the same article:
But the rise of blogs and social networks — and companies’ ability to post information on their own sites — transformed all this.
The relationship between companies and ability is one of possession, so the apostrophe is needed. If we were to replace ability with being able to—”companies’ being able to post”—we would have an accurate use of a possessive and a gerund.
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Tags: Apostrophe, PR, Punctuation, Wordnik
companies’ being able to post”—
surely the possessive can’t be right?
That suggests that “… people being able to …” would also require an apostrophe as a possessive.
In the context you offer isn’t “being” simply a present participle (consider “companies are being able to” (not that you’d want to use that construction.
Seems to me the apostrophe can only sit with being, if being is used as a noun. Consider: “the companies’ being (as in existence) was threatened by the global recession.”
I’d value your thoughts…?
cheers
colin
Gosh, I would have just assumed they didn’t know where to put their apostrophes.
@ colin pearce: “Companies’ ability” is correct. Ability is an attribute owned by multiple companies.
Colin, you ask a question that many people wonder about. The genitive case is broader than just the idea of possession. We use a marker–either an apostrophe (”the companies’ being able to post”) or a possessive determiner (”their being able to post”)–for relationships we don’t consciously recognize as genitive anymore. But my example is one that falls within what we think of as possession; “their ability to” is an equivalent expression to “the companies’ being able to.” The fact that you can swap out the participial phrase “being able to” and replace it with the noun phrase “ability to” is what tells you that “being” is indeed acting as a noun in the sentence in question.
“People’s being able to post” would indeed be what we would write if the context required it. Usage specialists have an ongoing debate about how to analyze such contexts, however, which would be the subject of a new post! I also wrote more about it in the April-May 2008 issue (”For clarity’s sake: The endangered concept of the genitive”).
First, I have to say that I would nix the apostrophes if I were the editor. The progressive analysis to me is the more normal one, and therefore should be preferred.
But I’m not convinced you can so easily say that what the writer did was wrong. You can substitute semantically equivalent nouns here: “For new companies’ effort”, and “the publicists’ deception”.
I have no idea why you think that gerunds can’t take objects. That would mean that only intransitive verbs could have gerund forms. What about “My hitting you was wrong”?
In The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, (2002), on p1222, Rodney Huddleston concludes a discussion looking at the distinction between gerunds and present participles in traditional grammar with:
“We conclude that there is no difference of form, function, or interpretation that correlates systematically with the traditional distinction between ‘gerund’ and ‘present participle’. The distinction introduces an unmotivated complication into the grammar: it is one of the features of traditional grammar that should be discarded.”
Randy, I disagree that you could swap nouns into the sentences in question. You’d have to recast the sentences themselves for the results to make sense. In the first sentence, you’d have:
“For new companies’ effort to get the word out, there’s a healthy measure of liberation in all of this.”
(There’s a healthy measure of liberation in all this for new companies’ efforts? No, it’s for the companies [the ones who are "trying to get the word out"], not for their efforts.)
“…because journalists would rather hear stories directly from the entrepreneurs who are genuinely excited about their companies — rather than from publicists’ deception— the role of publicists becomes less crucial.”
(Hearing stories from the publicists’ deception? No, it’s from the publicists who are “faking excitement.”)
In other words, to say that a noun could substitute for the participle in either case is to ignore semantics and to create antecedent-reference problems.
In talking about what a gerund can or cannot take, I was articulating a distinction between a gerund and a gerundive that is, as you note, rarely observed any longer. Under that analysis, “My hitting you” wouldn’t be allowed–which is probably why nobody bothers with making such distinctions any longer.
The Cambridge grammar is probably the most out-with-the-rules in its attitude of the current crop of grammars, and readers of this blog might enjoy the Language Log blog, to which Huddleston’s coauthor, Geoffrey Pullum, frequently contributes. I think it’s still useful to say that a given present participle is acting as a noun or is not (whether you want to call the noun a gerund or not is up to you), because recognizing the difference is what helps editors avoid errors such as the one I wrote this Tip about: misidentifying a present progressive and introducing a genitive marker (the apostrophe) into what is clearly not a context that requires the genitive.
The following is from Merriam-Webster’s. Doesn’t this say a gerund can take an object?
Main Entry: ger·und
Pronunciation: \ˈjer-ənd, ˈje-rənd\
Function: noun
Etymology: Late Latin gerundium, from Latin gerundus, gerundive of gerere to bear, carry on
Date: 1513
1 : a verbal noun in Latin that expresses generalized or uncompleted action
2 : any of several linguistic forms analogous to the Latin gerund in languages other than Latin; especially : the English verbal noun ending in -ing that has the function of a substantive and at the same time shows the verbal features of tense, voice, and capacity to take adverbial qualifiers and to govern objects
“Govern,” in the sense here, means to require a given word to take a particular case form. It’s not quite the same thing as taking an object; it means that it can say that a given word must be in the objective case.
But note again that I said “some grammarians” would make the distinction between a gerund (a verbal noun), which cannot take an object, and a gerundive (a verbal adjective), which can. Others use “gerund” for both. I’m not sure that I think the distinction matters a whit; what matters is that one be able to identify when a participle is acting as a noun (in which case it can take a possessive form) and when it is either an adjective or simply part of a progressive verb construction.