What are ‘agent emphatic’ sentences?

Agent emphatic sentences are those that stress ‘who’ is doing the action of a verb instead of ‘what someone or something is doing’.

In English we can change ‘active’ sentences (the ones that describe what someone did or will do) into ‘agent emphatic’ sentences (ones that stress ‘who’ is doing the action) by changing the tone of our voice, by dropping the action off completely or by adding a phrase like ‘is the one that’ …

What’s Tony doing?    Tony is eating the pie.  (active sentence, this is what Tony’s doing)

Who’s eating the pie?    Tony is eating the pie!   Tony is!   Tony’s the one eating the pie!    (agent emphatic, it’s Tony that’s eating the pie)

In te reo Māori theres a special sentence structure especially designed to do this, it’s called the agent emphatic.

If you’d like to learn more about it, I hope this lesson will help.

If you are already confident with the agent emphatic, or once you’ve complete why not test your knowledge with this 20 question quiz.  Click here 🙂