"is-is"

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Mar 17, 2006, at 6:46 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:

> Upon occasion, I use a triple-is, as in, "The fact of the matter is is
> [pause], is that I had no idea that I used such constructions till a
> triple-is happened to catch the attention of Phil LeSourd."

hmmm.  what you said here back on 8/2/04 was:

-----
A linguist friend of mine, to whom I will be forever grateful...,
pointed out to me that, in certain constructions, I was using a
triple "is," e.g. "What the situation is is [lowered pitch+pause], is
that I'm using a triple 'is' without realizing it."
-----

on this earlier telling, you produced an ordinary pseudocleft-based
Isis example.  it just happens that the subject wh-clause of the
pseudocleft ends in "is".  so: the sentence has three occurrences of
"is" in a row, but it's just an ordinary double-is example.

on your current telling, you produced a "thingy"-type extra-is
example that might be genuinely a triple-is example, since "the fact
of the matter" as subject would normally go along with only one
"is".  my guess is that the first two occurrences of "is" exemplify
the double-is construction and the third one is a disfluency.
(pauses with repetitions of material are a common type of
disfluency.  but not all occurrences of "is is" are disfluencies.)

one lesson to draw from this is that it's important to get the
examples recorded on the spot, with as much information about its
production as possible.  memory is not reliable.

arnold

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