"Is is"

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Aug 2, 2004, at 4:58 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:

> Brian Kilmeade, anchor on "Fox & Friends," 2 Aug 04:
>
> "Isn't the good news is we've really got 'em now?"
>
> Slip of the tongue?  Or a new syntactic twist on the "double is"?

quite possibly the latter.  it would be an example of what patrick
mcconvell calls "free-be's" --
"is" or "is that" marking a subordinate clause (in effect, acting like
a complementizer), but without the preceding context usually associated
with Isis, in particular, without an immediately preceding form of
"be".  i don't have any question examples, but i have some others:

They do what most investors do is buy up a lot of stock and sell it off
again.  (from Kathryn Cambell-Kibler, 2001)

She was telling me, is they have to eat with the kids. (from Diane
Massam, 1999)

That's why I did this, is because I didn't have a choice.  (from Andrew
Koontz-Garboden, 2002)

We looked at it this way, my partner and I, is that...  (heard by AMZ
on tv, 2001)

> BTW, I discussed "double-is" with my intro to linguistics class in
> November 2003, and none of the twenty-plus students were (consciously)
> familiar with the construction.

many of the people i've collected examples from -- including a friend
who's a very heavy user -- maintained they'd never heard such a thing.
and of course they never write it.  if you say you didn't hear what
they said and ask for a repeat, you get it back without the extra "is".
  (the originals don't have dysfluency prosody, by the way.)

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), adding this one to the collection