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Gerunds have proven to be adequate forms of "annoyances" to me and have thus led me to inquire their properties and uses. I would appreciate it if anyone could provide me with assistance in this predicament.

Do both of these sentences make sense? Explanations are valued.

  1. My absence at the dinner party was due to my playing chess with a colleague.

  2. My absence at the dinner party was due to my playing of chess with a colleague.

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  • I don't know the official answer, but I would guess that the version with "of" is correct. I am not sure what your goal is, but as a native speaker I can say that both would sound fine, the latter more formal.
    – skaz
    Jul 9, 2015 at 20:08
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    The first seems more idiomatic to me (American) but the second does not seem ungrammatical.
    – phoog
    Jul 9, 2015 at 20:08
  • I would not say of. Did you search the site using the gerund tag?
    – anongoodnurse
    Jul 9, 2015 at 20:18
  • The second one isn't ungrammatical; but playing doesn't function as a gerund in it. The -ing form can function as a gerund, a participle and a verbal/deverbal noun. Gerunds take an object. The second paying takes a PP, ergo, not a gerund.
    – Tushar Raj
    Jul 9, 2015 at 20:23

2 Answers 2

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The version "my playing chess" has the gerund "playing" and the direct object "chess". This is okay, since a gerund is a verb, and a transitive verb like "play" can take a direct object.

The second version, "my playing of chess", may be acceptable (it doesn't sound as good to me), but it's not a gerund. The fact that the logical object "chess" is preceded by "of" indicates that "playing" is a noun. This is what happens to logical objects of nouns, since grammatically, nouns cannot take direct objects. "Chess" has to be converted to a prepositional phrase because of this grammatical requirement. (Compare the verb "father" with the direct object "a son" and the noun "father" with the prepositional object "of a son".)

So, since in "playing of chess", the "playing" is a noun, it can't be a gerund (which is a verb form). This doesn't mean there is anything wrong with it, because there is a derivational suffix "-ing" which creates nouns from verbs, so "playing" may be a noun created by the addition of this suffix to the verb "play".

From the Wikipedia article on Gerunds:

  • I like playing football. (playing takes an object, so is a gerund)
  • Her playing of the Bach fugues was inspiring. (playing takes a prepositional phrase rather than an object; not a gerund)
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  • Have you looked at the definition of gerund lately? A gerund is a noun made from a verb.
    – phoog
    Jul 9, 2015 at 20:26
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    @phoog, that definition of gerund is incorrect. A gerund is head of a noun phrase, just as nouns are, but that doesn't make it a noun. A gerund cannot take an article and cannot be modified by an adjective, unlike a noun.
    – Greg Lee
    Jul 9, 2015 at 20:32
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    @phoog, in your example, "screeching" is a noun, as one can tell because it has "the" and because it is modified by an adjective. Compare the gerund in "Loudly screeching those curses hurts my ears", where absence of article, modification by an adverb, and presence of a direct object all show that we are dealing with a gerund.
    – Greg Lee
    Jul 9, 2015 at 20:40
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    @TusharRaj, Greg, The easy fix there is just to explain that gerund clauses can often perform the same functions that noun phrases do. Most often S, O or Complement of a preposition.
    – Araucaria - Him
    Jul 30, 2015 at 14:44
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    @Araucaria, Those might be selection restrictions, i.e. semantic, rather than subcategorization restrictions, i.e. grammatical (Chomsky made the distinction in Aspects). Compare "I know to return early", *"I know my returning early", *"I know my early return." The last is just as bad as the gerund form, even though it doesn't have a gerund.
    – Greg Lee
    Jul 31, 2015 at 16:53
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It seems like your confusion here is coming from choice of terms. Since the absence was a result of What your were doing and not exactly where you were, I'd replace "due to" to " because of ".

Due to is more appropriate nouns Because of is more appropriate for verbs (action)

Ex. My absence at the dinner party was because of my playing chess with a colleague. Ex2. My absence at the dinner party was because I had been playing chess with a colleague. The second example employs the use of past perfect progressive tense.

Gerunds ( Verbs acting as nouns) are usually followed by verbs, which distinguishes the present participle from an action term and a word that describes "what" in the sentence.

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