double bind

[Arnold Zwicky]

On May 22, 2012, at 10:00 AM, Wilson Gray wrote:

> On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 12:21 PM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
>>>> Does anyone see what's the tactic is?
>
> A) "Does anyone know what's the tactic?" X B) "Does anyone know what
> the tactic is?"

as i said in my posting, i'm dubious about the blend analysis, given other occurrences of emphatic "what's".

> But, fifty years ago, didn't Labov write that strings like A were a
> peculiarity of BE? If that was so, then the structure has taken United
> States English in general by storm, from that humble beginning.

A has Subject-Verb Inversion in a subordinate clause, which is what Labov identified as a characteristic of BEV.  whatever the history, A and its uncontracted variant
  A' ... what is the tactic
are now quite common -- and as far as i can tell, no longer with any particular association to BEV: i googled up:

a fair number of
  I don’t see what’s the issue (A)
but a *huge* number of
  I don’t see what is the issue (A')
and a lot of
  I don’t see what the issue is (B)

arnold

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