Word
И забастовка, и эпидемия продолжаются.
Meaning
Both the strike and the epidemic are continuing.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Breakdown of И забастовка, и эпидемия продолжаются.
и
and
продолжаться
to continue, to go on
забастовка
the strike
эпидемия
the epidemic
Questions & Answers about И забастовка, и эпидемия продолжаются.
Why do we use the reflexive verb продолжаются (with -ся) here instead of продолжают?
Because the action is happening to the subjects themselves. Продолжать means 'to continue [doing something]', which requires an active subject doing the action to an object. When an event continues on its own, Russian makes the verb intransitive by using the reflexive form продолжаться.
Why is there an И at the very beginning of the sentence?
The structure и ..., и ... is used to mean 'both ... and ...'. If it were just забастовка и эпидемия, it would simply mean 'the strike and the epidemic'. Adding the first и emphasizes that both of these things are currently happening.
What case are the words забастовка and эпидемия in?
They are in the Nominative case. Because we are using the reflexive phase verb продолжаться to show that something is continuing on its own, the events themselves are the subjects of the sentence.
Since забастовка and эпидемия are both singular words, why is the verb plural (продолжаются)?
Even though each noun is singular, together they form a plural compound subject (the strike + the epidemic = they). Therefore, the verb takes the third-person plural ending -ются.