[Ads-l] material on "is is", "double is", etc.

[Margaret Lee]

I thought we discussed 'double is' on this list several years ago.  Example:  'The thing is is that ...' 
It is one of President Obama's favorite constructions, with emphasis/stress on the first 'is.'

--Margaret Lee  

 
      From: Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
 To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU 
 Sent: Saturday, November 19, 2016 12:30 AM
 Subject: Re: material on "is is", "double is", etc.
   
Coppock and Staum (2004) argue against a “silent what” analysis on the
grounds that it cannot explain the presence of is in sentences like (10),
which they take to be of the same species as the double-IS construction:

10) That can’t be a very welcome outcome, is that rates will now rise.

I'm an is-is speaker - somebody pointed it out to me; naturally, I was
unaware of it - and, FWIW, (10) strikes me as just ungrammatical, even as
just an underlying representation. I realize that I'm about a
quarter-century behind contemporary syntactic theory and might feel
differently about it, were I sufficiently hip. But, as things stand, (10)
is "unreal, and I ain't going for it," as Richard Pryor used to say.

On Fri, Nov 18, 2016 at 8:29 PM, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu>
wrote:

> An announcement on my blog:
>
> https://arnoldzwicky.org/2016/11/18/the-isis-files/
>
> of a publicly available resource about this syntactic variant in English.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



-- 
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

   
 

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org