Dear H:
You wrote:
I came across your website while I was searching for some tips on English Grammar.
There you said something very interesting, which I quote below,
A basic grammar exercise we all had to do as children or students learning English was to identify the subject and verb of a sentence. Look at the following sentence:
Seeing is believing.
Each of the three words is a verb. Seeing is a participle used as a noun and is the subject of the sentence. Is is a tense and is the simple predicate. Believing is another participle used as a noun and is the subject complement (or predicate nominative).
“Oh, no!” you may be saying. “Seeing and believing are gerunds.” Yes, we have used that useless term for ages merely because people tried to make English (the round peg) fit into the square hole of Latin grammar. They declared that a participle was a verbal adjective. Period. Case closed. So they had to call it something else when it was used as a noun: gerund.
Now I want to ask u a q.
How do you teach, or explain, to the students that some verbal forms ending in -ing will have the genitive case of a pronoun, some having the nominative, while others having the objective case, as their “functional(?)” subject?
Examples are as follows.
1) I suggest your going to the party.(genitive)
2) I recollect his/him saying that.(both)
3) It being fine, we’ll go on a picnic this weekend.(nominative)
I teach these all quite differently. I still teach gerund and participle because that is what is standard. The article suggested we re-think this, especially since participles in English can sometimes act as adverbs.
Example #1 is nonstandard. I, along with the grammar text we use, tell students avoid using the possessive with a gerund when the possessor is taking some action in the sentence. I change it to “I suggest you go.” In #2 for the same reason use “him” instead of “his.” “Him” is the subject of the gerund. #3 Is a nominative absolute. Here “being” is a participle, and the phrase beginning with “it” is a noun phrase not otherwise grammatically related to the rest of the sentence.
That is is how I teach it. I hope this helps.