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)
produce some shorter lists of verbs that accept only possessive/genitive. (Corder: 65, Sch: 196) Graver joins these authors without mentioning concrete examples. (AEP: 156) Object or object com plement ? Another much debated issue is what the function of the -ing form is. After transitive verbs in the active voice the in g form immediately following the verb (perhaps along with a possessive pronoun or a noun in Saxon genitive) is called an object. In the type ob iect + present participle the latter can be described as object complement. The most cotroversial construction is the one when we have object + gerund, as it is rather strange to claim that the function of the gerund in VI like his playing the violin.' is that of an object, but in 'I like him playing the violin.' is that of an object complement, this is the reason why some authors try to create new terms to describe this phenomenon. Ganshina writes e.g. 'The ing-form when preceded by a noun in the common case or a pronoun in the objective case has a function intermediate between that of the present participle and the gerund... Such an ing form may be called a half-gerund. ' (Ganshina; 230) Corder calls this 1fused-participle construction'. (IIP: 64) Hornby says 'It is not always clear whether the word following the (pro)noun is a present participle or a gerund and ttie distinction is not important.' (GPUF: 30) Henry ihms writes that tha so-called 'half-gerund' used by Sweet, Ganshina and others does not exist. According to him we have here an instance of syntactic displacement. (The same process took place in the case of the construction 'accusative with the infinitive'.) In the participial construction after verbs of physical perception the object has a double function: it is the object of the finite verb and the logical subject of the participle. (E.g. I saw her coming.) In many gerundial constructions it is however only the subject of the -in g form, but not the object of the main verb. (I hate people being unhappy.) This seems to prove that it is not the usual participial construction. Ihms thinks however that the following shift has taken place here. Originally there was greater emphasis on the object than on the j^ing form, later on the -ing form gained more emphasis, and the object of the finite verb £ was gradually transformed into the subject of the non-finite, the
