Quotative [to be] + "that"

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Mar 25, 2005, at 3:56 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:

> If numerous other examples are available, well and good.  The kind of
> slip I'm thinking of is of the computer kind.  One is momentarily
> distracted or hits the wrong button and "agree" comes out "are."  A
> spell check won't find it.
>
> You'll forgive my skepticism.  I've certainly heard "I was like, 'this
> is crazy'" and even "I was all, 'this is crazy!"

the first is very frequent indeed, and the second has been attested for
roughly 25 years and is not a slip of any sort.

> But definitely not "I was, 'this is crazy!'" or "She's all that 'this
> is crazy!'"

the first is certainly attested in speech (and sometimes in informal
writing) and does not appear to be an error.  things like "She was that
'I'm crazy about it' " -- a stab at direct quotation -- strike me as
really dubious, but they're not what we were talking about, which is
things like "She was that she was crazy about it" -- indirect
quotation.  i *think* i've heard/seen examples of this.

i'm at home now, away from the material i have on this stuff, and it's
not on my computer.  unfortunately, the data i have isn't coded for the
relevant characteristics, so i'd have to sort through it by hand, which
is tedious indeed.

a possibly analogous case... work on "is is" (or "double BE" or
whatever you call it) reveals that though the second form of "be" (in
things like "The thing is is that we have to go") *can* be a kind of
disfluency, a mere repetition or partial restart, it very frequently is
just a part of certain speakers' (and some writers') English.  more
recently, my own data collection (as part of a group project at
stanford) shows that (a) there are many more types of systematic "is
is" than i had ever imagined could occur (*if you don't listen for
them, you don't hear them*), and (b) there are speakers for whom "is
is" is virtually categorical, occurring nearly every time it would be
possible -- these people just don't produce single-"is" examples like
"The thing is that I have to go" -- though i would never have imagined
that there were such people.

the moral is that just because you don't think you've ever heard it
doesn't mean it doesn't occur (even occur frequently).  and, of course,
that just because something is sometimes a slip doesn't mean that it
always (or even usually) is.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)