Have finished doing ?
Hello everyone! So, I was asked to analyze a sentence, and I thought I analyzed it correctly, but now I'm not so sure.
1. I have finished doing my homework.
I analyzed "have finished" as present perfect and "doing my homework" as a gerund and direct object. A comparable sentence might be, "I have finished my homework" where "my homework" is a simple noun phrase.
But it was brought to my attention that a passive construction wouldn't really work. And gerunds should be able to work as subjects.
"My homework has been finished" works. And yet, "Doing my homework has been finished" does not. Why not? Have I analyzed the sentence incorrectly?
Thanks in advance!
Top answer
Mr D And yet, "Doing my homework has been finished" does not. It does. Syntactically speaking, there is nothing wrong with your analysis.
- Mr D And yet, "Doing my homework has been finished" does not.
- It does.
- Syntactically speaking, there is nothing wrong with your analysis.
- But semantically, the passive construction of the sentence in question is "more unnatural" than the active counterpart, as neither one is really preferred to the NP version in normal discourse: I've finished my homework.
- By the way, in modern analysis, just NPs are labeled as "object"; other possibilities are simply called "complement".
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Mr D
And yet, "Doing my homework has been finished" does not.
It does.
Syntactically speaking, there is nothing wrong with your analysis. But semantically, the passive construction of the sentence in question is "more unnatural" than the active counterpart, as neither one is really preferred to the NP version in norma
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