Kimberly in IN Posted December 12, 2018 Share Posted December 12, 2018 Sentence - John was running. What is running? Back story, I am a part-time Resource Room teacher at a small parochial school. I was helping a fifth grader today with his ELA. The assignment was diagramming sentences. The teacher told the students what to look for in each sentence - gerund, direct object, prepositional phrase. This sentence was on the assignment sheet. The sentence "John was running." was marked as having a predicate nominative/predicate adjective. I was surprised and asked the teacher. She said running is a gerund and is acting as the predicate nominative. Silly me, I thought "was running" was past progressive, was running was the simple predicate. Can someone please explain it to me? I feel so silly but I don't see "running" in that sentence as a predicate nominative. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MFG Posted December 12, 2018 Share Posted December 12, 2018 The teacher is wrong. You are correct. 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LuvToRead Posted December 12, 2018 Share Posted December 12, 2018 7 minutes ago, MFG said: The teacher is wrong. You are correct. This. Running is what John was doing, not who he was. I am not grammar pro, but I think for running to be a predicate nominative, the sentence would need to be something like: John's favorite pastime was running. Running renames pastime. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EMS83 Posted December 12, 2018 Share Posted December 12, 2018 Our Growing With Grammar program would have that diagrammed as a verb phrase. John|was running 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kimberly in IN Posted December 13, 2018 Author Share Posted December 13, 2018 Thank you. I was so confused with the ELA teacher's explanation. She was so adamant and told me not to bother trying to understand the subject. Ugh 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tanaqui Posted December 13, 2018 Share Posted December 13, 2018 She wasn't taught this stuff, and now she's expected to teach it to her kids, so she's relying on the half-baked understanding she got as a kid. This is how ignorance perpetuates itself. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Suzanne in ABQ Posted December 13, 2018 Share Posted December 13, 2018 Yes to all the above. Gerunds end in -ing, but not all -ing words are gerunds. Gerunds act as nouns. In this sentence, to be a predicate nominative, the gerund would need to rename John, but it doesn't. It is a verb, acting just like a verb, a past progressive verb. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.