• jettrscga@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The reason it feels wrong is that “are” is the main verb in the sentence and shouldn’t be contracted. You are only supposed to contract auxiliary verbs like “you’re eating already” where eating is the main verb and are is auxiliary.

    Edit: (I used a bad example because “eating” is a noun, as pointed out below.)

    Un-edit: The example’s correct, “eating” is a verb in this context.

    Also, I’m thoroughly confused about who’s saying “you’re already” in this comic.

      • DaGeek247@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Yes. It doesn’t work as “you’re already” and really, it doesn’t work all thay well as “you are already” either. This is almost yoda levels of rearrangement.

        It makes the most sense as “you already are”.

      • hakase@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Yup, this is likely a phonological restriction in addition to a syntactic one, though it’s worth noting that the copula (the “be” verb) shows a lot of idiosyncratic behavior in different contexts in different dialects of English.

        It seems that this pattern may have something to do with stress assignment within a predicate, but I’m not sure what the conditioning environment is at first glance. Any English phonologists here who can shed some more light on this?

        • Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          I’m no expert, but I think “you’re already” doesn’t work because the “anti-stress” on the contraction tells us the focus is later, but the focus of “already” is actually on the “are” in “you’re”. It trips us up because it sneaks the focus past us and then just ends the sentence before the focus the stress told us about arrives.

          It may also be because “you are already” is a variant of the sentence “you are” which can’t be contracted, so the contraction insinuates “you’re already [something]”. It makes us parse a different sentence structure than it is, then we get confused when the sentence ends early.

      • quindraco@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        “Eating” isn’t a verb, either. The person you’re responding to just got some terms wrong, the underlying idea about contractions is correct.