Is it correct English to write “John he is my husband,” or, “Mary she went to the store?”
I hear this construction frequently from TV and Radio Journalists. Is there a name for this construction?
Learn English – Is it correct English to write “John he is the husband,” or, “Mary she went to the store?”
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Neither of those are idiomatic English in any dialect.
Titles describing your relationship to a person always go ahead of the name and never after it:
I visited Aunt Jane's house
Uncle Tom came to tea.
(X) I visited Jane Aunt's house
(X) Tom Uncle came to visit.
Where no relationship or honorific title exists, you can use the title Mr. (any man), Mrs (any married woman) or Ms. (any woman) followed by that person's surname to construct their "formal name":
Mr. Bullock and Mrs. Dangersmith were late to the meeting.
If the person has been granted an honorific title, such as Sir, Dr., Professor, Gen. or Fr., this replaces Mr., Ms. or Mrs. at the start of the name. If a person has more than one title, they are normally all used before the name instead of Mr, Mrs or Ms.
Sir Godfrey McDougal chairs the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs.
Lt. Gen. Sir Adrian Bradshaw is currently the head of Land Forces in the British Army.
When a person has several titles, some of which are extremely prestigious, sometimes less prestigious ones are dropped - for example although President Wilson has a PhD, he is not normally called "President Dr. Wilson".
As a learner you should think of honorific titles as part of a person's name: you should never add or remove titles for any reason without the permission of the person in question.
Note that some people use honorific titles as part of their stage name - notably Dr. Dre and Professor Green, however these are not formal titles and cannot be used on official documentation.
Post-nominal titles also exist, but are generally less significant and are optional, and describe the person's degrees, official honors and membership of some societies.
Gen. Sir Douglas Alexander KBE chaired the debate between Dr. Williamson MD. and Michael Davis MP.
Note that whilst the title Sir is reserved for people who have had that title officially bestowed by the head of state, the polite sir can also be used to emphasize respect and subservience:
Good evening, sir. How may I be of service?
Note that this is almost never used in American English outside of fixed idioms (such as "How may I help you sir?"), and is very rarely used in British English. In both cases, respect is usually conveyed by using someone's title and last name instead of their first name:
Would you like some tea, Tony? (ordinary)
Would you like some tea, Mr. Stark? (conveys respect to the listener by using their "formal name")
Would you like some tea, sir? (conveys extreme respect and subservience - this is normally inappropriate between friends or colleagues)
Sir is also used in formal letter writing as a fixed idiom to convey respect:
Dear Sir.
Please find attached the first draft of the report for your review.
Yours sincerely,
Mr. David Sawyers
Or when talking to a superior ranking officer in the military:
Sir! The enemy are attacking our left flank, sir!
The correct form would be
John was troubled by something but I didn't know what it was.
English usually forms sentences with a subject-verb-object structure, as in your first clause:
John (subject) was troubled (verb) by something (object)
The second clause is a little more complex:
I (subject) didn't know (verb) what it (object) was.
"what it was" here is an adjunct clause with "what" as a subordinate conjunction, which modifies the matrix clause "I didn't know".
Note that if you were to turn this into a question, you would use subject-auxiliary inversion:
What was it?
(Disclaimer: there are a number of grammatical topics covered here and it's almost certain that I've made a mistake somewhere along the line, so please feel free to edit the answer or comment pointing out anything I haven't explained properly).
Best Answer
This construction is common in speech, and in writing which emulates speech. The initial noun phrase acts as a discourse marker to announce a shift of focus to a new or resumed topic; it will usually be emphasized with stress, pitch, and prosody—often a falling pitch similar to 'comma intonation' or rising pitch similar to 'question intonation'. In writing it should be followed by some sort of disjunctive point, such as a comma, dash, question mark or colon.
The construction is perfectly grammatical, but it is rarely used in formal writing, which lacks the accompanying vocal resources. Formal writing has other methods for achieving the same marking: