Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1989. 19/3. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 19)

Abkarovits, Endre: Contradictions in Describing and Using the -ing Form as Object. (Complement)

- 14satisfactory. One oí my main interests would have teen to find cut wnen the gerund can be preceded by the possessive or ttie accusative form or by both. With patterns F4 and V4 the Longman dictionaries do not make it quite clear which case it is. Í4 stands for a gerund as direct object that may be preceded (but not necessarily) by a possessive pronoun, V4 stands lor object + -in

g form. The presence of both patterns would be the most likely indication of the occurence of both possessive and accusative but there are far fewer verbs labelled in this way than there should be. Among the examples given by these dictionaries there are very few with a possessive preceding the gerund, which makes the investigation of the problem even more difficult. Hornby has a special pattern (19 c) for this construction but in my whole list there are only 12 verbs indicated by this pattern while alone in two short exercises of 'Living English Structures' we can find 29 verbs after which the logical subject of the gerund is used in both ways. Similarly it is very difficult to find out which verbs govern only a possessive form. Many books do not mention this issue at all, while 'An Intermediate English Practice* has a list of 6 verbs of this type, Scheuerweghs mentions 7. Besides the above problems one has to face difficulties of a different nature, too. Although dictionaries are updated and revised from time to time, certain mistakes may not be noticed for shorter or longer periods. When I was consulting the 1974 edition of Hornby's dictionary, I noticed that several verbs the initial letter of which was n, r, or s were labelled by the pattern 60 (both gerund and infinitive) instead of the pattern 6C, which 1 expected to find after them. When í checked them in the 1983 edition of the dictionary, Í found several (e.g. necessitate, recall, recol

lect, recommend, rese

nt, res

ist^ risk, (can't) stan

d) corrected, but others (e.g. relish^ repent

, res

um

e

, ssve^ shur

i ) have still oeen left uncorrected. Besides the correction oi what has already been printed, new patterns have been introduced lor several verbs. Trie lesson to be drawn from this is that it is rat enough to have a good dictionary, but you should have a relatively recent edition (or rather the recent editions of more than one good dictionaries) as well. It is also interesting that some of the verbs that are to be iound in the lists of several widely used grammar- and practice books are not shown in