Uses of being

Question

I have some doubts while using Being. Will Anybody help me? 1)Obama says he is surprised and humbled at being awarded the Nobel prize.2) Being his wife dead,  he married another lady.

CalifJim · Accepted Answer

jaleel.nt1)Obama says he is surprised and humbled at being awarded the Nobel prize.

2) Being his wife dead, His wife being dead, he married another lady.

The second one is wrong. I've corrected it above.

The meanings are as follows:

Obama says he is surprised and humbled at the fact that he was awarded the Nobel prize.
His wife was dead, so he married another lady.

being is a form of to be, just like am, is, are, was, were, and been.
being is therefore often used in certain constructions where one of these other forms might have been used instead in another phrasing of the same idea.

CJ

Andriy Lapin · Answer

Jaleel.nt,

in the first instance, we deal with a phenomenon that is conventionally known as a passive gerund; the whole clause with being... can be substituted with a noun phrase, eg, ...this award. Therefore, we refer to being... as a nominal -ing participle clause. In the first sentence, it functions as a prepositional complement of as, which requires either a noun phrase or an -ing clause, as we can see here.

In the other example, there is poor word order. The first part (the one before a comma) should be reconstructed as:

His wife being dead, ...

This -ing clause is called absolute - it is not explicitly bound to the main clause syntactically. The normal word order is preserved, however, so the subject must come first. For further information: such constructions are technically known as nominative absolute participial constructions.

Respectfully, Gleb Chebrikoff.

Uses of being

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