2022-09-29
33 分钟From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.
I'm John McWhorter, and I want to respond to a comment,
a complaint, that I often receive from various quarters.
One of those things where I generally read it and I think,
well, you know, they're more interesting things.
But, you know, if you keep getting it over and over again,
then you have to realize it's something that perfectly intelligent,
normal,
often brilliant people are very concerned about and that therefore you as a linguist should be too.
That is a sentence like this one.
My mother, she's always telling me that.
That guy, he always wears that hat.
That kind of sentence bothers a lot of people.
There's an idea that the pronoun there, the subject pronoun, is unnecessary.
You already said my mother, so why do you then say she?
Shouldn't it be my mother always does that instead of my mother, she always does that?
It's redundant.
It's repetitive.
Why?
And people are often... writing to me and saying that they're hearing it more lately.