Timol:

Where are my manners?

First, welcome. We're an odd bunch here, as you've probably noticed, and we tend to grab bits of things and chew on them as we dash madly about on cotangents, which is a sort of explanation of why we're suddenly talking parsing rather than phrasing.

Secondly, either construction is perfectly OK. A maven who gets little discussion on this board, one James J. Kilpatrick, often discusses in his columns questions such as the one you have raised. He espouses watching for the sonorous linkages within a sentence, and would probably counsel you that, while grammatically correct, the usage of two short a's in successive syllables (and am) does not fall trippingly off the tongue.

I'd agree with him.

TEd


TEd