It is important ~ing

Question

Hi~I wonder if this sentence is right grammatically:"It is important learning English."Original sentence is "It is important to learn English."Thank you!!

CalifJim · Accepted Answer

anonymous"It is important learning English."

It's not really very idiomatic. It sounds wrong. I recommend that you stick to the infinitive "to learn English".

CJ

BillJ · Answer

Compare these four examples:

[1] Learning English is important. [basic version]

[2] *It is important learning English. [extraposed gerund-participial clause]

[3] It is important to learn English. [extraposed infinitival clause]

[4] It is important, learning English. (right dislocation)

[1] is the ‘basic’ version, and [2] is the extraposed version of it. The latter is unacceptable because, with a few exceptions, Extraposition doesn’t extrapose NPs (noun phrases), but only clauses. The fact that gerund-participials are more like NPs than infinitivals are is seen in the fact that they can invert with the subject in interrogatives, and this greater likeness to NPs is reflected in their being less readily extraposed than infinitivals like [3], or finite clauses. I haven’t seen a detailed attempt to say when gerund-participials are OK in extraposition, but certainly some cases sound fine -- though not yours.

Now consider [4] which is acceptable because unlike [2] it has a comma after “important”. This is a crucial point: that phonological difference makes it a different construction, called 'Right dislocation', where there is an ‘extra’ NP (or clause) added to the right of the main element. Note that unlike in extraposition, the later element provides a referential interpretation/clarification of the dummy pronoun “it”.

It is important ~ing

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