I am wondering if it is correct to say, "I love it that the children enjoy school", or "I love that the children enjoy school", in colloquial speech?
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Good question. "I love it that X" is definitely something you can say in spoken AE, but I don't think I've seen a construct like that for any other verb. – Jeremy Feb 04 '15 at 00:09
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It also works with "hate". – Oldbag Feb 04 '15 at 00:54
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Related, possible duplicates: “I like it that” vs. “I like that”; “I hate when…” vs “I hate it when…”; and “Why …?” vs. “Why is it that … ?” – choster Feb 04 '15 at 01:09
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The version with "it" is fine, but I don't think the version without "it" sounds very good. The construction with "it" (after "love", "hate", "can't stand", ...) was linked to the presupposition that the object complement sentence is true, and "it" was supposed to be a reflex of "the fact", in an early paper by Paul and Carol Kiparsky, Fact, which appeared in 1971 in Semantics, a collection edited by Danny D. Steinberg, Leon A. Jakobovits.
Greg Lee
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