Consider the conversation.
A: "Most Americans love baseball."
B: "It's a stereotype."
I suppose they are natural. Is it still natural if I combine them into one sentence like this.
Most Americans loving baseball is a stereotype.
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The first line would be OK IMO but the last line sounds very strange to me.– user17814Commented Jul 21, 2020 at 2:50
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1 Answer
It's grammatical, and I could see it being used naturally in some cases. But the more common and broadly preferable formulation would be "It's a stereotype that most Americans love baseball."
"Most Americans loving baseball" is used as a noun in your sentence, but that's not immediately clear as you begin reading or hearing it. The reader can't begin parsing the grammar of the sentence until they hear its end, and then they have to backtrack.
Conversely, "It's a stereotype that most Americans love baseball" prioritizes both grammatical framing and the context of what you're quoting and why.
As an alternative, even a slightly simpler noun phrase, "Americans loving baseball is a stereotype," would be slightly more clear and have fewer possible continuations.
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1Agreed. Also, you'd really have to stress it exactly right for people to understand it, since it sounds odd to begin with. It certainly looks weird — I wouldn't write it.– codi6Commented Jul 21, 2020 at 6:08