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

[Ben Zimmer]

Among the posts catalogued on Arnold's page are two that I wrote for
Language Log on Obama's use of the "is is" construction.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4269
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4593

On Sat, Nov 19, 2016 at 10:41 AM, Margaret Lee <
0000006730deb3bf-dmarc-request at listserv.uga.edu> wrote:

> 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.
> >
> >
>

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