Did you know that wolves carry food to their young by swallowing it and bringing it up again?
That’s the sentence and my colleague’s specific problem is with the word “swallowing” and possibly also “bringing”.
Are they verbs? What kind of verbs? Are they some kind of verb-noun?
Uh, if you don’t know, I’m not a kid and this is not some cheap attempt at “homework” cheating. My colleague told me that it can not be a verb in the traditional sense because it is in a prepositional phrase. Is this right? Is by strictly a preposition or does it serve some other purpose here?
Oh, and the worksheet the colleague used has no answer key. He actually is doing a pretty good job engaging his kids by seeing what they think. And he freely has admitted he isn’t sure, which is the right thing to do.
As gerunds both “eating” and “bringing” would be on staircase lines from the diagonal line carrying “by”. The “its” would be the objects of two gerunds and would be treated as a direct object would be with a predicate but following the gerunds, of course.
“up” and “again” would run diagonally from “bringing.”
A gerund is a verb form that acts as a noun. The best example I’ve heard:
Singing is fun.
This form of “to sing”,a verb, is obviously acting like a noun subject of the sentence.
SpoilerVirgin has it right. They are gerunds in phrases… Object of preposition “by”.
Also, gerunds of transitive verbs can take objects. Gerund - Wikipedia