there’dn’t’ve

0:00 Is this introduction weird?

0:01 Yes, it's.

0:04 If "it's" is just a contraction of "it" and "is",

0:07 then why doesn't that work?

0:08 In fact, why didn't English just do a find-and-replace

0:10 on all the contractions?

0:12 I'm sure there'dn't've been any problems with that.

0:14 Ah.

0:15 Well, how do we understand where the problem's with this?

0:18 I was supposed to've'd a brilliant idea here,

0:20 but it appears...

0:21 it'sn't.

0:22 Okay, let's expand those back out.

0:24 That took me about seventeen takes to get right.

0:26 Why don't those contractions work?

0:29 Let's talk about "it's" in that introductory line.

0:32 "It" is just a pronoun, doing its job,

0:34 referring to something that's established earlier

0:36 or obvious from context.

0:37 But what's the "'s"?

0:39 You can't even really say it on its own.

0:41 It's just kind-of leaning on the "it" for substance.

0:44 Which is why the technical term for it is "clitic",

0:46 from the Ancient Greek "enklitikos", meaning "to lean on".

0:49 A clitic is a part of speech that can't exist just on its own.

0:54 Now, we've talked about things like this before:

0:56 prefixes, suffixes and other affixes,

0:58 things that attach to words like ‘-able' or ‘un-'.

1:01 But a clitic isn't one of those.

1:03 And we know that because it doesn t attach to individual words:

1:06 it attaches to a phrase, a bigger part of speech.

1:10 So using a prefix or affix,

1:12 you can go from a dog to a

1:14 proto-dog or an anti-dog or an astro-dog.

1:17 Or you can say that something is "dog-ish".

1:19 Those all attach to the word "dog".

1:21 If you add some detail, you say "my beautiful, green, astro-dog",

1:25 not "my astro-beautiful, green, dog".

1:27 That doesn't work.

1:28 For a clitic, it's different.

1:30 "My astro-dog's been learning tricks."

1:33 There's the clitic, just after "dog".

1:34 Let's add some more detail.

1:35 "My astro-dog from Jupiter's been learning tricks."

1:39 That movement of 's, within the sentence,

1:41 means it can't be an affix; the ‘s behaves like it's the whole word,

1:45 like it's "has".

1:46 Not "is"… "has".

1:48 All that means that ‘s has to be in its own category, it's a clitic.

1:52 But that doesn't explain why it doesn't work sometimes.

1:55 If it was always possible to contract ‘is' and ‘has' down like that,

1:59 there might be an argument that it's just a pronunciation thing?

2:02 There has to be some additional reason

2:04 that means "it'sn't" and "yes, it's" are ungrammatical.

2:08 Now, if you want the full answer to that, you can read

2:11 Anderson's "Aspects of the Theory of Clitics",

2:14 but a quick warning,

2:15 it is 287 pages long not including the references and indices.

2:18 So to summarize as best as I can for English: there are two reasons.

2:23 The first is what's called a Syntactic Gap

2:26 which means the presence of the clitic

2:28 strongly implies that another word should follow.

2:31 I think Anderson's best example is:

2:35 "Who do you think you're?"

2:37 ...who do you think you're what?

2:40 Meeting?

2:40 Talking to?

2:41 It feels like there should be another word

2:43 in that syntactic gap,

2:44 the clitic is "stranded" at the end.

2:46 And flipping that around, if you say

2:48 "Who do you think you are meeting?",

2:50 the sentence feels… not ungrammatical,

2:53 but maybe a little awkward and robotic.

2:55 And very much tied to that is the second reason:

2:58 stress patterns.

2:59 Part of the reason these forms can be reduced so much

3:02 is because they're generally unstressed, or weak.

3:04 They're pronounced quieter and less distinctly.

3:07 You cannot stress a clitic, and it sounds weird when you try.

3:10 So let's try!

3:12 If a child's parent is pestering them because they haven't cleaned up,

3:14 the kid can reply "i AM going to do it",

3:17 that's called ‘rejoiner emphasis',

3:18 but they can't say "iMMM going to do it".

3:21 Doesn't work.

3:21 So if the verb would contextually be in its weak form, unstressed,

3:25 and it also starts with /w/, /h/, or a vowel,

3:28 it can get even more reduced to this clitic form.

3:30 So, we get "we'll," "they've," "you'd," I'm," and so on.

3:33 Repeat enough times, they become grammaticalized,

3:36 and they start to get written like that as well.

3:39 In theory, something like "there'd'n't've'" could work.

3:42 After all, "shouldn't've" is grammatical in spoken English, as in

3:46 "I shouldn't've done that."

3:47 Actually, in my dialect, if I'm talking quickly,

3:49 I pronounce that as either /ʃədənə/ or even just /ʃədn/.

3:52 Like, "/ʃədn/ done that".

3:54 Languages change and evolve over time, words become clitics,

3:58 can stay that way for a while

3:59 and then eventually they may start to sound ungrammatical

4:03 to future generations.

4:04 After all, we used to say "'tis" not "it's", so who knows:

4:08 in a century or two, maybe "there'd'n't've"

4:11 will be perfectly unremarkable English.

4:14 If you want more detail about this, there's a whole episode

4:16 on my co-author Gretchen McCulloch's podcast "Lingthusiasm",

4:19 the link is on screen or in the description.