Analysing Sentences

[edwinghansen]

I would like to analyse the sentence " They talked about what needed doing." You can see from my profile that I am 61 so this is new to me and confusing; because of threads of former teachings. To me "what needed doing" is a clause where 'what' is the subject,(being the relative pronoun) 'needed', the verb and 'doing' the gerund object of needed.

 

[Grablevskij]

Let me try.

Gerund may be active and passive.
If the what is the subject, that means that the what must act itself.

But there are some exceptions. I mean when active is used instead of passive.

These shoes need repairing.
These dishes need washing.

So, maybe you really should correct your sentence.

Michael

 

[edwinghansen]

Let me try.

Gerund may be active and passive.
If the what is the subject, that means that the what must act itself.

But there are some exceptions. I mean when active is used instead of passive.

These shoes need repairing.
These dishes need washing.

So, maybe you really should correct your sentence.

Michael

Hi Michael,
Thanks for responding. This is my first foray into this field. I do have an old English book and its reasoning regarding "what" is that it is an "antecedent-relative" (pronoun) which means it contains the antecedent within itself.
You are way over my head with active and passive Gerunds. I do not understand this at all. The sentence I used was taken from this site so I take it as being correct.
I really want to be able to de-construct a sentence because I feel if one can de-construct a sentence then one will be able to build a sentence because the understanding is there. I suppose it starts with Parts of Speech.
once again thank you
ed