Select the option that conforms to standard formal academic style regarding the subject of a gerund:
The department chair strongly objected to ________ the confidential grant evaluation criteria to external commercial lobbyists.
Answer and explanation
Correct answer: B. his disclosing
Answer: his disclosing. Why not the others: 'him disclosing' uses the objective case pronoun, which is common in informal speech but considered substandard in prescriptive formal testing; 'he disclosing' uses the nominative pronoun before a gerund; 'him to disclose' uses an ungrammatical pronoun-infinitive complement after the preposition 'to'.
- Step 1: Identify the grammatical structure: 'disclosing' is a gerund functioning as the nominal complement of the preposition 'to'.
- Step 2: In formal academic English, the noun or pronoun modifying a gerund takes the possessive form ('his disclosing') rather than the objective form ('him disclosing').
Practise more Participle Clauses, Non-Finite Verb Forms, and Modifier Placement.
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