Possessive before a gerund.

To me they both sound like it's the whispering that the teacher dislikes, but the first is closer to disliking the child.

Yeah, in the first sentence it makes sense of directing the dislike to the child:
"The teacher dislikes the child [that is] whispering to his classmate"

The second one is directed to the child's whispering.
The teacher dislikes the [child’s] whispering [to his classmate]

How about when written as below?


Which student does the teacher dislike?

The one over there, whispering to his classmate.

"The teacher dislikes the child [that is] whispering to his classmate">

Yes, a reduced relative clause. It could of course be read as the teacher hating the whispering, but not with the context the question gives. The question implies that the teacher dislikes one child.

"dislike one('s) doing"

Fowler discussed this subject a century ago. Please visit [url="http://www.bartleby.com/116/212.html"] here [/url] if you like.

paco

I cannot think of a context in which an educated speaker in the US would ever use anything other than a possessive with a gerund. (In the first example “The teacher disliked the child whispering …” “whispering” is used as a participle, not a gerund.) I have often been perplexed to see an objective pronoun used almost universally here in the UK, even in apparently educated speech and broadsheet

I don't know which people in the U.S. you've been talking to.

"His father doesn't like him driving the new car."

I don't think people would say "His father doesn't like his driving the new car". It's too likely to be heard as "His father doesn't like his driving" (his bad driving) with "the new car" tacked on, which then makes the listener reevaluate the whole sentence again

Thanks for your reply, but I would always use the second versions, or perhaps "His father doesn't like him to drive the new car," and so would most of my friends and family in the U.S. While the first versions may be fairly common mistakes in informal speech, I would be astonished to to see them in the New York Times. The Times (London), however, would not scruple to say "His father doesn't lik

OED

The gerund still retains one feature of the verbal noun, namely, that of admitting of a preceding possessive case or possessive pronoun, as in "after John's behaving so strangely", "upon my readily granting it". In the literary language this construction is regularly retained with a pronoun, and very generally with a single personal substantive; but, with names o

Thanks. I hadn't thought of checking the OED on a grammatical point.

As I don't have the Chicago Manual of Style or any similar American reference work near to hand, I did a quick Internet search ("Chicago Manual of Style" + gerund + possessive) to see if I could find anything citing the Chicago Manual on this point. I didn't find an exact match specifically quoting the manual but did