Question of subject agreement, sounds bad but why?

Question

Could someone please help me define what is wrong with the following:

"Living Life is not made up of material things"

I think there is lack of agreement with verb and subject, but what else, grammatically speaking, is wrong with the phrase? It sounds so pitiful. (This is used as a sig by a poster on another forum.)

Miriam · Accepted Answer

Subject and verb do agree in that sentence.
What sounds awkward, to me at least, is the subject itself, "living life". It's redundant. If we're going to be strict here, you can only live life.
"Life is not made up of material things" sounds much better to me. However, the head of the subject in the sentence you posted is "living", so if we got rid of the modifier we'd have "Living is not made up of material things".
Still acceptable, I think, but not the option I would choose. I cannot give you a logical grammatical explanation for that; this is, to me, one of those cases in which something just sounds/doesn't sound right.
Perhaps it has to do with the fact that the head of the subject is not a noun but a gerund? This may not make much sense, but a gerund gives the idea of "movement" in a way. And I don't find it easy to agree with the idea that a process is "made up of" anything, as if it were a static thing. Not sure this is clear, but I wouldn't know how to word it better.
We're lucky that many people who seem to know lots will read this and, hopefully, give both of us the right explanation.

Miriam

Question of subject agreement, sounds bad but why?

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