Timeline for Why do we use 'telling' in the following sentence?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
19 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Feb 19, 2016 at 10:02 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/StackEnglishLL/status/700621552862294016 | ||
| Feb 14, 2016 at 5:04 | comment | added | user24743 | @ColleenV This question also asks about the difference between the two under depletive (it) or dislocation construction and difference in their meanings. Also, the answer in the link doesn't address these issues. | |
| Feb 14, 2016 at 4:26 | review | Close votes | |||
| Feb 14, 2016 at 5:40 | |||||
| Feb 14, 2016 at 4:07 | history | edited | ColleenV |
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| Feb 14, 2016 at 4:07 | comment | added | ColleenV | Possible duplicate of What is the difference between "gerund" and "infinitive"? | |
| Feb 14, 2016 at 3:51 | history | migrated | from english.stackexchange.com (revisions) | ||
| Feb 13, 2016 at 10:58 | comment | added | rhetorician | @WS2: You're right. I'm sorry. I'll delete the comment. Don | |
| Feb 13, 2016 at 8:46 | answer | added | BillJ | timeline score: 1 | |
| Feb 12, 2016 at 23:14 | answer | added | Jessica | timeline score: 0 | |
| Feb 12, 2016 at 22:45 | comment | added | Hot Licks | "Telling your mum and dad" is a clause which functions as a noun. It is effectively a parenthetical clause, and, if it were embedded as an actual parenthetical, the sentence would read "Was it (telling your mum and dad) difficult?" Thus that clause identifies the noun corresponding to the pronoun "it" in the sentence "Was it difficult?" (which is a perfectly fine sentence by itself, without the troublesome clause). | |
| Feb 12, 2016 at 22:24 | comment | added | Hot Licks | If you did the substitution you'd have to remove the comma. | |
| Feb 12, 2016 at 22:05 | answer | added | CR Drost | timeline score: 1 | |
| Feb 12, 2016 at 21:49 | answer | added | Lynnjamin | timeline score: 1 | |
| Feb 12, 2016 at 21:33 | comment | added | BillJ | @WS2 Of course there's an object The non-finite sub clause may be the subject of the sentence but it still has "telling" as its verb and "mum and dad" as the object of that verb. | |
| Feb 12, 2016 at 21:19 | comment | added | WS2 | @BillJ ...telling your mum & dad is a noun clause (using a gerund). It actually qualifies the subject of the sentence, namely it. There is no object, just a complement difficult. | |
| Feb 12, 2016 at 20:57 | comment | added | BillJ | @user159328 It must be a verb; it has a direct object, "mum and dad". | |
| Feb 12, 2016 at 20:52 | comment | added | user159328 | What part of speech is 'telling'? Is it gerund used as a noun? | |
| Feb 12, 2016 at 20:46 | comment | added | WS2 | They are both grammatical and mean almost exactly the same thing. Telling has a slight tendency to refer to the actual process of telling, whilst to tell inclines fore to the wider fact of having to tell. But most of the time they are interchangeable. | |
| Feb 12, 2016 at 20:36 | history | asked | user159328 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |