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The surge in its shares of triggered the market's circuit breakers and trade was halted after a 44% jump in early session.

I think the sentence above is wrong, and it should delete the word "of".

I parse the sentence like this :

The surge / in it shares / triggered / the market's circuit breakers / and / trade / was halted / after a 44% jump / in early session.

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    Some (intelligently challenged) people replace "have" with "of", because they don't know better. Depending on the source, maybe this is the case here.
    – npst
    Feb 11, 2014 at 10:54
  • @npst Can you give me more information of the source that people replace "have" with "of"?
    – user48070
    Feb 12, 2014 at 1:38
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    @user48070 Of and unstressed have are typically homophones, so there's no way to tell them apart in speech from sound alone. As a result, some people mix them up in writing: you'll see mistakes like *would of and *could of fairly frequently.
    – user230
    Feb 12, 2014 at 2:26
  • @snailplane So you mean "would of" and "could of" are wrong??
    – user48070
    Feb 12, 2014 at 2:27
  • @user48070 Yes.
    – user230
    Feb 12, 2014 at 2:29

2 Answers 2

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As you correctly discern, of is an error here and should be deleted.

Some respondents suggest that this is a common uneducated mis-spelling of have, and that is possible; but I think it very unlikely. A present perfect is not exactly ungrammatical here, but it fits awkwardly with the past form in the following clause: a present perfect suggests that the topic is the current result of the surge, but the past tense suggests that the topic is its past result.

A simpler explanation is that the author (or a later editor, updating a developing story with later events) was working with some such phrase as “surge in shares of more than 15%” and failed to delete the of when revising.

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There is a trend to replace have with of in sentences. This is what appears to have happened here.

This has come about from spoken speech where expressions like Should have become elided to Should've then erroneously expanded again to Should of.

To propagate this error into writing is frowned upon but your interpretation of deleting the of is correct.

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