Grammar Girl here, a listener named Tom wrote him with a question about repeated subjects.

He enjoys listening to the Planet Money Podcast, which explains economics in everyday language,

but he's noticed that the hosts often repeat the subject of a sentence.

And now, here are two examples of the kind of sentences that are bothering Tom from the

April 8th Planet Money Podcast.

Really this whole fight, it doesn't matter for the deficit.

This year's federal deficit, it's about $1.5 trillion, so that's $1,000.

In his email, Tom writes, quote,

"'Their constant use of a double subject makes me crazy.

I'd like to persuade the people who do this podcast to mend their ways just this little

bit.

Can you help?'

The Cambridge grammar of the English language refers to this kind of sentence as left dislocation,

which sounds unpleasantly like something that happened to one of my friends on a ski trip.

In our first example, the noun phrase, this whole fight, has been moved or dislocated

to the beginning of the sentence, which is on the far left when the sentence is written

out in standard left to right fashion.

This dislocated noun phrase has been replaced in the rest of the sentence by the pronoun

it, so that we end up with the double subject that's bothering Tom.

This whole fight, it doesn't matter for the deficit.

But left dislocation doesn't just happen with subjects.

You also find it with direct objects.

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