Possessing Infinitives

Question

Quizás sea una pregunta loca pero quiero saber si se puede poseer un verbo en el español Como tal en inglés. Por ejemplo en inglés: I admire your going shopping for me. Y en español: Admiro tu ir de compras por mí. Puede ser así en español? ¿O sea que es equivocación de español e inglés y es una pregunta muy loca? Por favor corrígeme los errores de gramática.

corrígeme los errores de gramática - 0074b507, Dec 23, 2011

"...de español e inglés...." - jlupine, Dec 24, 2011

Answer 1

Hehehehe!

It's not a silly question. And yes, you can, you definitely can.

The problem is... that as soon as you own an infinitive... it turns into a noun. :(

It happens in both languages

Admiro tu caminar.

I admire your going shopping

they work as nouns.

The sentence "Admiro tu ir de compras por mí" does not work too well in Spanish, that's why I avoided using it as an example. I think we'd say:

Me encanta que vayas de compras para mí

or similar.

thank you very much! - Himself12794, Dec 23, 2011

Answer 2

• The correct way of saying that would be,

Aprecio que hayas ido de compras por mi.

Answer 3

The native speakers will have to decide what's grammatically possible and idiomatically popular, but the possessive pronouns with infinitives in Spanish sound odd to me. In English, we sometimes use possessive pronouns or articles with gerunds although not, as far as I know, with infinitives. rpem's shift to the present perfect surprises me: perhaps it reflects the contrast between "I appreciate their buying gifts for me." v. "I appreciate having gifts bought for me." This construction is probably a real challenge for machine translations.