Grammar question -- prevent him coming or his coming?

Factual Questions
21

I think ordinarily, “him V-ing” is going to sound more colloquial whereas “his V-ing” is going to sound more formal, as in the following:

1a. I was really bothered by him doing that.
1b. I was really bothered by his doing that.

In your particular example, I think something else is going on that’s making “his” sound more natural.

There are at least two possible syntactic frames for the verb “prevent”:

  1. X prevent Y from V-ing
    In this frame, Y is the agent of some imminent eventuality of V-ing and X acts in such a way as to prevent the eventuality. (e.g., John prevented Mary from causing trouble)

  2. X prevent Y
    In this frame, by contrast, Y itself names the imminent eventuality (e.g., John prevented the trouble.), and that eventuality takes the form of a noun phrase.

I think the availability of that first frame makes “prevented him from coming” the most preferred, and given the choice between “prevented him coming” and “prevented his coming”, the latter is going to be preferred, since the use of the possessive pronoun makes “his coming” sound altogether more “nouny” (since possessive pronouns can ordinarily occur with nouns but accusative pronouns cannot), and hence a more natural description of a (nominalized) eventuality.

22

LOL Good catch!

23

Strunk and White prescribes the first option.

As others have noted, “coming into the country” is a noun phrase, modified by “his.” It may help to consider the question via a simpler sentence:

  1. He washed his car.
  2. He washed him car.

The first option jumps out a little more clearly in that context.

24

Thanks for all the great opinions, and a few weird ones. I have to single out RealityChuck here as being particularly bizarre. I’m just not seeing the shading in meaning he talks about at all. Still, I’m not trying to put him down. I appreciate all the efforts to shed extra light on this point.

25

Interesting example. I was about to come in and say that that “his V-ing” was about on on a par with with “whom”, which you generally only use in formal discourse, but “by his V-ing that” doesn’t sound stilted or formal to me at all.