What is the name of the grammar structure for sentences or expressions in the examples below?
Your coming here is always a pleasure!!
Your talking to her made all the difference !!
In these sentences the expressions : coming and talking are what? Verb , noun etc ?
They're verbs.
Notice how you can't say those sentences with "the":
"*The coming here..."
"*The talking to her..."
And you definitely can't use "the" and still make it about this "You":
"*The coming of you here..."
"*The talking to her by you..."
But you can say things like:
"That you come here..." or
"That you talked to her..."
or
"It is always a pleasure when you come here" or
"It made all the difference that you talked to her"
This seems to be evidence that these are not gerunds, but deep-structure verbs which have been stuck in the subject position because there's nothing else to be there. This is called a transformation, I suggest looking up "passive sentence transformation" to learn more about them.
A gerund works like:
"The ending was great"
or
"The talking was non-stop"
Another examples:
"Coming here was horrible"
Even though "coming here" is in the subject position, it's a verb with an object! Nouns can't have objects like that, no matter what. And, as we expect:
"*The coming here..." just doesn't sound right.
Hope that works for ya!
Each is preceded by a determiner, and each is the subject of a clause. Together that makes them nouns.
