Can the gerund clause take a personal pronoun as its subject in “It’s no use (his?) crying over lost love”?

Question

From a gram­mar book, I’ve have learned that a gerund clause can be
op­tion­ally pre­ceded by a per­sonal pro­noun to show the log­i­cal
sub­ject of the verb; that is, who­ever is do­ing the gerund’s ac­tion.
I’ve also learned that a pos­ses­sive per­sonal pro­noun is usu­ally more
ac­cept­able here than a pro­noun in an­other gram­mat­i­cal case like
those used for sub­jects or ob­jects of fi­nite clauses.
With gerund clauses, there’a a cer­tain struc­ture that runs like this:

It’s no use do­ing some­thing.

in which do­ing some­thing is the gerund clause
and do­ing the gerund head­ing that clause.
My question is: Can we also add a pos­ses­sive pro­noun be­fore do­ing
in that par­tic­u­lar struc­ture?  So for ex­am­ple like this:

It’s no use his cry­ing over lost love.

Does it sound com­pletely nor­mal to use the pro­noun his there to say
who’s do­ing that ac­tion?
If not, is there some other way of say­ing it that would be more com­mon
and nat­u­ral-sound­ing to na­tive speak­ers?

user97589 · Answer

In the grammar book, I have learned that a gerund can be preceded by a
  pronoun (usually more acceptable, a possessive pronoun) to show who it
  is that does this action.

Any noun can be used as the subject of the participial clause, not just pronouns. You should think of the -ing part as a clause, forget about the term "gerund". This and any other clause has to have the subject. It may not be overtly shown in the sentence, but it has to be understood, otherwise the clause wouldn't be interpretable. When you say: There's no use crying. the subject of "crying" comes from the context (rather than from the sentence).

As for the case, the accusative is as common as genitive (or even preferred choice). It was different in the past though. Here's from Jespersen's Modern Grammar, :

With pronouns , we find both cases (nom. and oblique) used here, the
  latter however chiefly in vulgar speech, which here as elsewhere,
  tends to use the oblique in many combinations where educated speech
  has the nominative.

Jespersen was a Dane, but he was obviously a good English grammarian. Don't let that bother you too much.

Can the gerund clause take a personal pronoun as its subject in “It’s no use (his?) crying over lost love”?

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