He turned his face toward the window without stopping scrolling on his smartphone.
Is it grammatically correct to use a gerund after the gerund form of the verb "to stop", which needs to be followed by a gerund in this case?
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2ell.stackexchange.com/questions/44078/…– Dhanishtha GhoshCommented Oct 2, 2020 at 14:25
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@DhanishthaGhosh, Good find!– Rayan KhanCommented Oct 2, 2020 at 14:27
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@Wistful. I guess it does answer my question, although the example sentences used in that post don't include a negative. I'm still left with the possibility that the use of two consecutive gerunds after "without" might sound odd to a native English speaker, who perhaps might formulate the sentence in a different way. But maybe I'm just being overly paranoid.– FraCommented Oct 2, 2020 at 14:38
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1The simple answer is no. The succession of two gerund-participials is excluded with certain verbs by what is known as the 'doubl-ing constraint', which typically applies with a small sub-set of catenative verbs like "begin", "cease", "continue", "start", "stop".– BillJCommented Oct 3, 2020 at 9:27
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@BillJ So, how would you phrase the sentence then? How about, "without ceasing to..."? Or, "without stopping THE scrolling on..."?– FraCommented Oct 6, 2020 at 10:42
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