Word
Le stampanti inservibili, le ho scartate tutte.
Meaning
The unusable printers, I discarded them all.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Breakdown of Le stampanti inservibili, le ho scartate tutte.
avere
to have
tutto
all the / whole
la stampante
the printer
inservibile
unusable
Questions & Answers about Le stampanti inservibili, le ho scartate tutte.
Since this lesson is about optional past participle agreement, is the agreement in scartate optional here?
No, it is strictly mandatory in this sentence. The lesson covers optional agreement with the relative pronoun che, but here we are using the direct object pronoun le to say "them". Whenever you use the third-person direct object pronouns lo, la, li, or le before a compound tense, the past participle must agree with them. Because le is feminine plural, the participle must be scartate.
Why does the Italian sentence use the pronoun le when it already mentions le stampanti inservibili?
This is a structure called left dislocation. The speaker moved the direct object (le stampanti inservibili) to the front of the sentence to emphasize it as the main topic. When you pull the object out of its normal position like this in Italian, you must insert a direct object pronoun (in this case, le) right before the verb to refer back to it.
Le stampanti is feminine plural, so why doesn't the adjective inservibili end in -e like regular feminine plural adjectives?