Distinguishing between POSS-ing and ACC-ing: Evidence from 'with(out)'

There has been disagreement concerning whether the two types of verbal gerunds in English, POSS-ing and ACC-ing, are semantically equivalent. This study focuses on a distributional difference that provides evidence for assigning different semantics to POSS-ing and ACC-ing: while both with and without can select ACC-ing as their complement, POSS-ing is only compatible with without. I present a semantic and pragmatic interpretation for the structure 'without' + POSS-ing, and then discuss two explanations for the distributional asymmetry based on the assumption that POSS-ing, but not ACC-ing, should be familiar in the discourse.