Prepositional phrase followed by a prsent participle?

Question

Can a prepositional phrase be followed by a present participle? ?(!)
"He kept on changing the subject."
Where is the present participle here?

"I know here 'kept on' is the phrasal verb and "on" is used as an adverb but if we remove the word 'changing', then it surely becomes a preposition making 'on' a preposition an

Inchoateknowledge · Accepted Answer

Can a prepositional phrase be followed by a present participle? ?(!)
"He kept on changing the subject."
Where is the present participle here?

"I know here 'kept on' is the phrasal verb and "on" is used as an adverb but if we remove the word 'changing', then it surely becomes a preposition making 'on' a preposition and 'on the subject' a prepositional phrase. Is this all right? Yes
By the way, keep to the subject then.

CalifJim · Answer

I think you are asking this in a confused way.

A prepositional phrase is, for example, along the road. A present participle is, for example, whistling.

Can a prepositional phrase be followed by a present participle?

Yes.

The old man walked along the road whistling.

However, from your example, I don't think this is really what you wanted to know.

He kept on the subject has the prepositional phrase on the subject, yes. But He kept on changing the subject has nothing to do with that prepositional phrase. Here we have the idiom keep on, a catenative verb which is always followed by a verb in the -ing form. There may be an object that goes with the -ing verb, as we have here (the subject).

Just picking words out of a sentence and combining them doesn't really show us anything about the structure of the sentence. We don't take the sentence

He looked upon his work with great satisfaction

and say that it contains the prepositional phrase upon satisfaction!

CJ

Prepositional phrase followed by a prsent participle?

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