Some times that rule applies, other times it doesn’t.
Shall we find a situation that’s in the grey zone?
Yeah, let’s!
Nah, we won’t.
~800 years ago:
will = wol
wol not > won’t
If I could add another contraction to that list, I’d
A contraction is a separate word, with its own accepted usages in the community. For example, “gonna” comes from “going to”, but is not the same, as “I’m gonna the shop, do you want anything?” sounds wrong
Yeah, “gonna” needs to be followed by a verb for it to sound right, I think, with the exception of it being used as a response affirming they’ll be doing an action.
“You gonna go to the store?”
“I’m gonna, just gettin my shoes on first.”Sometimes they end up that way (at which point they stop being contractions). However, there are also cases where distinct syntactic words end up being pronounced as phonetically single words. Or, as my morphology professor put it, “word” is not a meaningful category.
For example, consider the sentence “I’m happy”. What is the subject of this sentence? The verb? What part of speach is “I’m”?
Language is…
Some folks will never eat a skunk, but then again some folk’ll.
Cletus, the slack jawed yokel?
The contraction literally isn’t right. It only works with the adverb version of “have”.
it’s what it’s
This one is correct but sounds wrong because we usually say it the other way.
Well they’re all “correct”. They just don’t sound right. Like saying “the red, big apple” instead of “the big, red apple”.
Wait, I remember learning in primary school about the correct order for adjectives. Is that not a thing?
There’s not a rule, it’s just a “sounds correct”. Because English doesn’t have rules, it has exceptions.
Cambridge even uses the word “normally” lol. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/adjectives-order
And here’s a fun stackexchange link where people argue about the order (since there isn’t a rule, it’s all made up). https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1155/what-is-the-rule-for-adjective-order
One good quote from that link:
@cori - the fascinating linguistic point is that native speakers will have subconsciously inferred a rule like this without it ever being stated. The “rule” is really an observation of what they do. All languages and dialects consist of such unconscious rules. – Nathan Long Commented Apr 16, 2013 at 15:25
Fair
I would never say YOU HAVE GOT MAIL without the contracion, I would say “you have mail”, and with the contraction in the shorter sentence it sounds British to say: “you’ve mail”
English is three languages in a trench coat acting like one.
It’s what it’s.
“It’s” specifically is funny because you can use its alternative version “'tis” in some places that you cant use “it’s”.
‘Tis what ‘tis
Tits what tis.
It’s what ‘tis.
You wouldn’t
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had the dumb thought that if you and your friends are imprisoned, you’d ask the warden to “let’s out!”
This must be why Data can’t use contractions. Except in those episodes where he apparently can.
You think it do, but it don’t.
That’s wrong. Correct would be “doesn’t”.
Gah! Yes, quite rightn’t.
They don’t think it be like it is, but it do.
As you all know, many posts are poorly censored to confound OCR. I don’t love that, but it makes sense.
Sometimes I think things have been censored, but it turns out that they were simply partially obstructed by UI elements on my phone.
For this post, I had to try to figure out how “linguist” was offensive before I discovered there’s apparently now an entirely functionless line that shows up on the bottom of my screen when opening images.
'Tis.
