영어 동명사의 대명사 주어에 대한 코퍼스 기반 연구

A Corpus-based Analysis of the Poss-ing and Acc-ing Variation in English

Although the variation between Poss-ing (= possessive + gerund) and Acc-ing (= objective + gerund) has long been among the most contentious issues in English grammar, few previous studies have provided an extensive empirical analysis of the variation. This study examines the use of the pronominal subject preceding a verbal gerund on the base of the data from seven English corpora. The results indicate that although both possessive and objective are widely attested in American and British English, their use varies considerably across genre and grammatical function, while showing a consistent historical change. Thus, the objective is most frequent in spoken texts but least common in academic texts, and the possessive shows the opposite distribution. Moreover, the possessive is almost always chosen when the gerund functions as a sentential subject, while the objective is most heavily used when the gerund occurs as a verbal object. Diachronically, the use of the objective, the innovative form, has shown a continuous increase in the last two hundred years, gradually threatening the dominant status of the possessive, the conservative form, and finally becoming the unmarked form in American English around the 1930s.