TYPICAL ERROR: REPEATING THE SUBJECT
27 / 02 / 2006
TYPICAL ERROR: REPEATING THE SUBJECT: meaning and examples
Good morning,
I hope you had a good weekend.
As an English teacher over the years, I have heard a lot of sentences like the following:
1) ***The house it's very beautiful.***
Do you know what's wrong with this sentence?
The problem is that the
verb IS has two subjects: "
the house" and the pronoun "
it". As you know, a verb can only have
ONE subject. The correct equivalent of sentence (1) is sentence (2) below:
2)
The house is very beautiful.
Students often also make this repeated-subject error with other pronouns (
he,
she,
they)
3) ***The man he was very kind.***
4) ***Americans they are very naive.***
The correct versions are.
5)
The man was very kind.
6)
Americans are very naive.
When you speak, remember that it's not necessary (nor grammatically correct) to repeat the subject of the sentence with a pronoun. It's difficult to catch yourself making these mistakes when you are concentrating on simply communicating coherently, but if you begin to pay attention, I'm sure you will be able to avoid this error in your English.
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Have a great day!