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I have already used structures such as "I don't like him singing the song" or "I don't like his singing the song". It dates back to years age when I learned it. So I wonder if I can use the following structure:
In these stories, the reader still expects the story to continue and receives no sign of the story ending.
where, I refer to ending as a gerund. I am quite tempted to use this sentence and it sounds right. However, I don't know if It is correct grammatically and why if so?
A useful way to tell whether an -ing form is a noun or a verb is to see whether it would need an adjective or an adverb to modify it. Sometimes it's ambiguous, but not here. "...receives no sign of the story sudden ending"* plainly sounds wrong, whereas "...receives no sign of the story suddenly ending" is fine. "Ending" in that sentence needs an adverb, not an adjective, so it's unambiguously a verb, not a noun. It's not a gerund.
