Is the use of 'he' required?

English as a Second Language English Vocabulary, Grammar and Idioms
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Is ‘he’ required here?

The place was named by King 2 after (he) being impressed by the scenic beauty of the place.

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To me, the sentence makes sense only if you rewrite as follows.

The place was named by King 2 because he was so/very impressed by the scenic beauty of the place.

If you do want to use a gerund I suggest the following:

The place was named by King 2 because of his being impressed by the scenic beauty of the place.

Let’s see what @Alan has to say on this matter.

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Sure sir,

Thank you.

Could you throw some light on the gerund form mentioned here…“his being?” Are such forms used by using possessive pronouns and ing form of verbs?

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Let’s stick to the sentence at hand. Looking at it again I think it should read:

The place was named ‘…’ (here you need a name) by King 2 (actually, ‘2’ looks quite strange and unusual here) since he had visited it and was very impressed by its scenic beauty.

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I agree that you need to name it as something. Better still would be to ‘call’ it something and King 2 is very odd. ‘2 is usually ’II’ or ‘The Second’ and is attached to an actual name.

Best to re-jig the whole sentence and say -

King George II had been so impressed by the scenic beauty of the place that he called (decided to call) it Wisteria.

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Sure sir,

Thank you.

Could you throw some light on the gerund form mentioned here…“his being?” Are such forms used by using possessive pronouns and ing form of verbs?

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7

It is possible to use this construction with possessive adjective + gerund and also object pronoun + gerund. Some examples -

Do you mind me eating first or Do you mind my eating first?

Do you object to him using your car or Do you object to his.using your car?

Does that help?

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Hi Alan, thanks a lot for your examples. Incidentally, I’ve just came across another one in the book I’ve been reading for the past couple of days:

Luckily, he was clever enough to know that his always being right was unlikely to find favour with all those who were correspondingly always wrong.

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Alan, I like your living examples using the objective case of the pronoun. But it is often found in spoken contexts rather than in formal written contexts where it is almost always (except in dialogues) in the possessive case.

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