Tuesday, April 3, 2018

pronouns - Wow! Nice! I smelled you baking cake!


Which one is grammatical?



"Wow! Nice! I smelled you baking cake!"
"Wow! Nice! I smelled your baking cake!"



Both of them are acceptable, maybe?



Answer



These are idiomatic:




I smelled you smoking out in the tool shed, you little twerp. I'm going to tell Dad on you. An eight-year-old shouldn't be smoking.


Did I smell you burning dead leaves last night? The breeze brought the scent in our window.


I smelled you frying fish.



I would not use "your" with any of those actions. But I'm not sure why. Because the transitive verb smell demands a smellable object? A noun phrase like "your frying fish" is, as a kind of possessive abstraction, inherently unsmellable, whereas "you frying" is closer to "raw" reality? Just a half-baked conjecture.


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