student asking question

Can I understand "the mayor renaming" as "the mayor renamed"? Would the meaning be different if I replace "renaming" with "renamed" here?

teacher

Native speaker’s answer

Rebecca

Yes, that's correct. "The mayor of DC also renaming a street ..." can be rewritten as "the mayor of DC also renamed a street ... " without changing the meaning of the sentence, as this is referring to incident that has already happened. However, tenses always need to stay consistent, so the sentences preceding and following it that use the verbs ending in "-ing" should also use the past perfect tense as well. For example, "the city, putting Black Lives Matter in giant yellow letters ... " should thus become "the city put Black Lives Matters in giant yellow letters ..."

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