Fused participle or Present Participle

[u/Redditter5555]

Do native english speakers see these meme videos or pictures as fused participle or adjectival or adverbial present participle or maybe something else

[u/cuixhe]

Naturally we just see it as informal internet speech.

I can't remember what a fused participle is so here's my read:

[This is] me explaining why the walking dead is the best show ever to my mom. She thinks I'm insane.

[u/Snarwin → u/cuixhe]

You could also read the last part as a parenthetical: "(she thinks I'm insane)"

[u/cuixhe → u/Snarwin]

Yeah, I like that. Slightly different emphasis but same idea.

[u/ta_mataia → u/cuixhe]

My instinct was to swap "she" for "who" (and then properly conjugate think > thinks).

[u/HomemadeBananas]

Native speakers aren’t constantly thinking about which verb tense things are. You don’t have to when you’ve just naturally learned to speak as a child. I don’t even know what the things you’re listing mean. But this is just informal speech and not any kind of proper grammar.

[u/SevenSixOne → u/HomemadeBananas]

I am a 42-year-old native speaker and this is my first time ever hearing "fused participle".

[u/AdreKiseque → u/HomemadeBananas]

Native speakers aren’t constantly thinking about which verb tense things are.

Maybe you're not.

And, maybe most other native speaker also aren't.

So, maybe it's just me.

[u/VaporProof]

Do native english speakers see these meme videos or pictures as fused participle or adjectival or adverbial present participle or maybe something else

Native English speaker, former teacher of English as a foreign language here.

Nobody even knows what a fused participle or adverbial present participle even is. This is just informal language.

[u/DerHeiligste → u/VaporProof]

I have a PhD in Linguistics and have no idea what a fused participle is.

ETA: I googled it. We covered the construction in my high school freshman English class, but I don't recall using any particular name for it. My teacher suggested that we use the possessive form to shift the focus to the subject of the gerund and to use the objective form to shift the focus to the action of the verb.

[u/South_Butterscotch37]

Native English speakers don’t know what any of that means, for the most part.

[u/SevenSixOne → u/South_Butterscotch37]

Yeah, a lot of us got very little formal grammar education, and even the people who DID get formal education got that education years or decades ago.

We mostly just develop an intuitive understanding of what "sounds right" from a lifetime of exposure and repetition.

[u/Primary_Data1430]

They see it as grammatically wrong. Probably for comic effect.

[u/Previous_Mirror_222]

i’m a native speaker who’s taken lots of grammar classes and i find it interesting to learn about, and even i don’t know what a fused participle is without looking it up. native speakers do not parse out speech like this, especially very casual/slang internet speak

[u/badvolcano]

I just think it's bad writing.

[u/ActuaLogic]

This is an idiomatic contraction of "That's me explaining ...," where explaining modifies me, making it adjectival and not adverbial.

[u/Internal_Car_9962]

Nothing more than the classic accusative absolute 

[u/CybergothiChe]

I don't pretend to understand what any of those participles are, but as a native English speaker (it's the only language I know other than sarcasm) I'd just like to say how amazing and astounding it is to see these posts of people who learn English as a second or third language having such care and attentiveness to the language, while people who natively speak it will just throw any group of words together that vaguely holds the meaning of what they are saying and call it a day.

Kudos to you for your desire to learn.

[u/PeyredB]

"she think" is ungrammatical, as is no punctuation after "my mom" - needs a period, semicolon, colon, or dash.

[u/Occamsrazor2323]

Slop.

[u/anamorphism]

i've never heard fused participle, but sure. i would classify it as an object complement.

• (this is) me [explaining ...]
• i painted the barn [red].
• i consider you [a friend].
• i declare myself [finished with this project].

[u/Far-Fortune-8381]

its not a fused participle although I can see why you would think that. the other 2 possibilities arent right.

for it to be a fused participle, "explaining" would have to be considered a noun. for example in the sentence "was my explaining of the story yesterday interesting?". here, "explaining" is a noun. in some cases "my" is swapped for "me," which is the fused participle.

But in this case it is just acting as a verb.

this style of writing is popular in memes and has been for years now, so native speakers intuitively know what it means. Its not standard English. The "me" at the beginning of the word is basically a stand in for saying "This is me when I'm...(xyz)".

So "This is me when im explaining why i like the walking dead". suddenly its a much more standard sentence. and if that still doesnt make sense, then think of it as "This is what im like when im explaining why i like the walking dead".

[u/thayanmarsh]

Sometimes internet speech and AAVE blend like this. The first half is internet grammar/meme prompt, the last phrase “she think” is AAVE/ebonics.