Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. Vol. 1. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 24)

Endre Abkarovits: The -ing form after finite verbs in the reference books of the nineties

2 The treatment of the occurrence of the -//inform after finites with or without its own logical subject in between in earlier reference books The findings of my research at the end of the eighties were summarised in a table showing information offered by 12 widelyused reference books and they proved that there were a lot of contradictions between the authors. Grammar and usage books offered lists of various lengths, often selecting verbs at random. The richness of information, however, was not in close connection with the bulkiness of the book. Some quite thin dictionaries (like The BBI Combinatory Dictionary) or grammar books offered in certain issues more information than the most revered grammar books of Quirk et.al. At that time it wasn't technically possible to select a top list of the - let's say - 30 or 50 most common verbs with the -ing form, so the usefulness of grammar and usage books depended on the intuition of the authors. It was no wonder that these lists did not coincide. It was less understandable why the dictionaries couldn't pay more attention to these constructions. At that time I was interested in the issue of whether infinitive and gerund were equally acceptable after the verbs of my list and if a gerund was used, its logical subject could be expressed by both an accusative pronoun / noun in the common case and a possessive pronoun / noun in the genitive case or only by either of these. This latter issue was touched upon by very few books, most reference books described the choice as a matter of style (though some considered it to be rather a matter of individual preference, eg. BBI : xvii) and even sources which attributed some importance to this problem did not offer full information. Most dictionaries did not have a separate pattern for the different constructions, and even those which had, did not use them consistently. As I still had the feeling that perhaps some reference books dismiss the treatment of the problem as if it were non-existent or at least the standard being the accusative and the possessive belonging to the formal (written) style, suggesting that the former is more common, I decided to check a few of these verbs in the COBUILD database. The following table shows that such generalisations are dangerous and it would be good to know why with some verbs the use of the two forms is fairly balanced, but with others one form is 83