[Ads-l] An early "is is."

[Robin Hamilton]

... or to put it another way, sometimes is is is, and sometimes is is ain't.

R.

> 
>     On 28 March 2017 at 14:53 "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
> 
> 
>     > On Mar 28, 2017, at 4:56 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
>     > wrote:
>     >
>     > Even Old New York was once New Amsterdam.
>     >
>     > 1.8 million raw Googlits for "The thing of it is is."
> 
>     you completely misunderstand the point here (probably because you haven't
> read any of the material i pointed you to).
> 
>     the issue is how to classify particular *instances*. a major point in the
> tecnical literature of Isis is that *some* occurrences of "is and "is" in
> succession are disfluencies, while others are not -- and the latter ones are
> examples of Isis. Isis is, in fact, quite common these days, and people
> (inclding me) have collected sizable collections of examples. (punctuation in
> written text is not always reliable, so collecting clean data usually involves
> at least listening to the examples, or, better, doing acoustic analysis (which
> has been done, to separate disfluencies from true Isis).
> 
>     nobody is claiming that all instances of "is" followed by "is" are
> disfluencies. quite the contrary: Isis researchers claim that Isis is now a
> construction of vernacular spoken English, an alternative to single-BE
> examples, that it is now widespread (though far from universal), and that it
> arose fairly recently. meanwhile, the relevant sort of disfluency has
> presumably been around for many centuries -- virtually never represented in
> texts because it's a phenomenon of speech.
> 
>     putting all this together, i judged that the example you found was
> probably a representation in writing of a disfluency (we can't know for sure,
> since all of this is in fiction) -- a nice early example of a disfluency
> represented in fiction, in fact, part of the long movement towards
> representing spoken dialogue more accurately, more realistically, in fiction.
> 
>     but i carefully said "probably". i would have been much more impressed on
> the Isis side if Peacock had written
> 
>     > "The thing of it, Waldron said... "is is that this order was set up for
>     > you personally."
> 
>     or
> 
>     > "The thing of it is is," Waldron said ... "that this order was set up
>     > for you personally."
> 
>     or
> 
>     > "The thing of it is that," Waldron said ... "this order was set up for
>     > you personally."
> 
>     now for another confounding fact, about all those occurrences on the net
> of "The thing of it is is". alas, an incredibly common *typo* is the doubling
> of function words; the occurrence of "the the" is absolutely astounding, and
> "to to" is pretty impressive as well. so lots of "is is" would be no surprise
> in rapidly performed, unedited, informal writing on the net.
> 
>     add to this the fact that writing on the net very often dispenses with
> commas where they would be called for in careful writing.
> 
>     and add to this the fact that raw ghits are a very poor gauge of actual
> occurrence, since there are many repetitions in google searches.
> 
>     so the question is: with repetitions removed, how many of the "The thing
> of it is is" examples actually represent writers' intentions? that is, to what
> extent is Isis moving from speech into informal writing? i wouldn't be
> surprised to discover that this has been happening recently, but i have no
> evidence on the matter.
> 
>     arnold
> 
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> 

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