“I have the utmost respect for Angelina. She’s a very sweet person, very talented and one of my best friends in the world.” - Billy Bob Thornton, about Angelina Jolie
Billy Bob has made an error in parallelism. His second sentence contains a list of items that are not all the same grammatical structure.
Look at the three items in Billy Bob’s list:
- a very sweet person [This is a noun phrase - "a" is an article, "very" is an adverb, "sweet" is an adjective, and "person" is a noun.]
- very talented [This is an adjective phrase - "very" is an adverb, and "talented" is an adjective.]
- one of my best friends in the world [This is a pronoun phrase - "one" is an indefinite pronoun, "of my best friends" is a prepositional phrase, and "in the world" is a prepositional phrase.]
Nouns and pronouns share the same grammatical functions, so using both a noun phrase and a pronoun phrase in a list is fine. However, using an adjective phrase in a list with a noun phrase and a pronoun phrase breaks the parallel structure.
One way to create parallel structure in Billy Bob’s sentence is to change the adjective phrase into a noun phrase.
“She’s a very sweet person, a very talented actress, and one of my best friends in the world.”
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