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Eddie88 Posted 17 years ago
Grammar

Two quick questions.

The dummy it:

1)I thought that it (is) best we do this tomorrow.

Correct me if I am wrong, but ‘is’ is unnecessary in the above sentence.

Is it unnecessary to include ‘is’ when ‘it’ is a dummy it which doesn’t refer back to something or the subject?

Appositive:

2)I am hungry, so hungry that I ate my friends’ lunches.

Is this appositive (more specifically a resumptive modifier) grammatically acceptable here since the noun has ‘so’ infront of it? I thought it may not be o.k. because a resumptive modifier needs to begin with a noun, but it now begins with an adverb…

Thanks.
  

Top answer

1) In your sentence, "is" is necessary. ) This is a special type of construction, whose grammatical name I'm afraid I don't know, that you can use with verbs such as "think", "consider" and "deem". " This is OK, but I think I would personally use a dash rather than a comma.

— Mr Wordy

  • 1) In your sentence, "is" is necessary.
  • ) This is a special type of construction, whose grammatical name I'm afraid I don't know, that you can use with verbs such as "think", "consider" and "deem".
  • " This is OK, but I think I would personally use a dash rather than a comma.
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1 Answers
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1) In your sentence, "is" is necessary. The combinations of tenses in sentences like this are somewhat fluid, but I think I would usually say:

"I think (that) it is best (that) we do this tomorrow."

"I thought (that) it was best (that) we did this tomorrow."

The construction without "is" that you may be thinking of is:

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