1

The governors would, of course, agree to your being admittedly pensioned.

I could not understand the use of "your being" here; why does this sentence construction used here? (As I've often read that preposition takes objective case but here your is a possessive case)

ColleenV
  • 11,971
  • 13
  • 47
  • 85
M.Naeem Ahmad
  • 553
  • 6
  • 20
  • 4
    The quote, from the wonderful 'Goodbye Mr Chips', actually uses the word "adequately", not "admittedly". "Your being adequately pensioned" is not a genitive (possessive) NP, but a non-finite clause as complement to the prep "to". "Your" can be replaced by "you" with no change of meaning. – BillJ Jul 24 '17 at 14:33
  • @BillJ The pronoun here is in fact possessive, as it should be with gerunds (and it is a common mistake to interprete it as a non-finite clause and use the non-possessive pronoun here). "Being pensioned" is a gerund, not a clause. –  Mar 18 '18 at 17:30
  • 4
    Does this answer your question? "I'm used to him being away " or "I'm used to his being away". It's entirely a stylistic choice whether to refer to your* being pensioned* or to you* being pensioned. But I have no idea what "admittedly* pensioned" might mean here (I assume "pensioned" means "given an occupational pension", but even that seems like unusual phrasing here). – FumbleFingers Sep 13 '21 at 15:53

1 Answers1

0

The sentence here is a common structure used in English. Here, "your being admittedly pensioned" is referring to a quality of yours; a kind of pensioned-ness that you have. If the governors would agree to your being pensioned, that means that they would, essentially, give you the attribute of pensioned-ness. In other words, they would give you pension.

A. Galloway
  • 571
  • 2
  • 8