EXPLANATION Compare these sentences:
- The cat likes your mohair jumper.
- The cat likes your scratching her ears like that.
The grammatical structure of those two sentences is actually the same: subject, verb, object. (The object is what the subject acts upon.) In both sentences, the object of the verb likes is a noun. In the first sentence, the object is the noun jumper. In the second sentence, the object is the verbal noun scratching. Because -ing words are usually part of verbs, people often do not recognise when an -ing word is functioning as a noun.
No one would put the ordinary pronoun you before the word jumper in the first sentence. (No one would write: The cat likes you mohair jumper.) It is just as incorrect, grammatically, to use you in the second sentence. (Another way to look at it is that the cat likes your scratching, not you!)Only the most precise writers and speakers of English understand and use this construction. A classic example of its being used is by Oscar Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest. Algernon says such things as:
It is perfectly absurd your saying that your name isn't Ernest.
Jane Austen uses it in Pride and Prejudice. On learning that an eligible bachelor has moved into the neighbourhood, Mrs Bennet, mother of five daughters, says to her husband,
Did you notice how a possessive pronoun was used in the discussion above in the paragraph beginning, 'Only the most ...'? See if you can find it.