It’s pretty common to use a phrase like “Your car’s pretty fast” to say “Your car is pretty fast”, but is this a gramatically correct contraction? Can you add “'s” to any noun to make it a “noun is” contraction?
It’s done so much that I’d be surprised if it was wrong, but I don’t know absolutely for sure that it’s right. “'s” can also mean “has” as in, “My car’s been in the garage for a week,” or show possession, as in, “Isn’t that Jim’s car?”
Well, showing possession is clearly a case where it’s supposed to be used. The others ones I’m not so sure about, even if it is exceedingly common.
“Your car’s pretty fast” is just replacing letters with an apostrophe. “car is” becomes “car’s”. The “has” situation is the same-- “car has” becomes “car’s”. The possessive situation is the only one where the apostrophe isn’t replacing letters that have been taken out.
Looking in a dictionary will show you that “he’s” and “it’s” can mean “he is” or “he has” and “it is” or “it has,” respectively. I would imagine every native speaker of English has been taught this from the beginning of their schooling. Why would you doubt that it’s grammatically correct?
And yes, you can essentially add apostrophe-s to any noun to form “noun is,” within normal bounds of making sense and not sounding ridiculous.
The acid test for whether or not any given construction is grammatically correct in a particular language is to find a group of native speakers of the language and see if they use it. If they do, then it is correct. Since virtually every native English speaker I know uses this construction all the time, it is to me obviously correct (in every dialect of English I know of).
In contrast to what Gary T said above, I think that “schooling” does more to confuse kids about grammatical correctness than to help them understand what I stated in the above paragraph. Kids don’t learn their native language by having it formally taught to them in school, they learn it from their parents, from television, on the street, etc., and the native-speaker intuition gleaned from such immersion is infinitely more robust than anything gleaned from formal training.
I can, however, think of some examples that may be borderline because of certain syntactic constraints:
*(?) The puppy that I want to buy’s black and white.
Granted, “buy” is a verb here, not a noun, but this example shows that perhaps the contraction cannot be applied to the noun phrase “The puppy that I want to buy.” Let’s try constructing a noun phrase that ends in a noun and see what happens:
*(?) The dog in my room’s whining.
This sounds a little better to me, but YMMV. Everyone speaks a slightly different dialect of English.
In any case, examples like those cited above may be quite common in fast, colloquial speech. I’m sure there’s been a lot of research done on this phenomenon in the linguistic community, but I think that’s beyond the scope of this post.
If, on the other hand, the OP means to ask whether these contractions are condoned by prescriptive grammarians, then I would say that it would probably be acceptable to them in casual speech, but in formal written prose, it may be deemed too casual.
How about this one then:
Which is the preferred choice for “It is not”…
a) It isn’t
b) It’s not
and although I have never seen it, this has puzzled me since I was about 8 years old, is it not possiible to use “it’sn’t”.
Dude, that is like so like true! I mean, me and my friends used to like talk about that all the time. We like used to be hard to like put up with.
Gotta disagree there. You can find groups of native English speakers who use forms that are not grammatically correct, e.g. whole towns or counties in Texas that routinely say “I seen.”
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Well, yes, speech is learned mainly in the way you say, but I don’t see how schooling would cause confusion – unless they only hear incorrect speech in everyday use, as in my example above. And my point in mentioning schooling was to underscore the legitimacy of the apostrophe-s = is construction questioned in the OP.
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Although your examples would sound like an apostrophe-s construction because of elision, I’m not sure that careful writers would write them with those apostrophes. I think you’re dealing with apples compared to the oranges addressed in the OP.
Of course, if a construction is used by a group of people, then it is “correct,” as far as anything in language can be correct or incorrect: linguists are strinctly anti-prescriptivist.
However, there is this thing called Standard English, and it’s good to know it.
['s] can be used as a contraction for [is] when following a noun or pronoun. English phrase structure posits that a verbal phrase have a determiner as its specifier; my brain is dead right now, but I’m not thinking of any instances in which an unvoiced grammatical unit intercedes between a verbal phrase and its determiner… so there is nothing blocking cliticization… so it can happen.
Though there’s technically no problem with it in this respect, cliticization is not in the mode of good formal English, and semantically it’s bad because it’s indistinguishable from the possessive 's.
I am writing 20 pages on checking theory right now, and absolutely don’t have it in me to diagram the phrase “it is not,” and look for fancy diagrammatical type things… but I don’t think that the cluster “tsn” that pronounciation of “it’sn’t” would require is possible in English… also, double cliticizations don’t happen. I think. Brrr, time for a tea break.
*(?) The puppy that I want to buy’s black and white.
Ah. Here, the phrase “is black and white” has an unspoken determiner, see? “It” is implied immediately beforehand. “The puppy that I want to buy PRO is black and white.” That’s why you can’t cliticize, in that example.
Sorry for multiple posts:
*(?) The dog in my room’s whining
Same thing. “The dog in my room PRO is whining.”
's wonderful, 's marvellous
you should care for me!
's awful nice, 's paradise,
's what I love to see
— George and Ira Gershwin, 'S Wonderful
I asked because I realized that the use of adding an apostrophe to any noun to make it a contraction is totally common in informal English, I wasn’t sure if was a technically correct thing from a grammarian point of view or if it were just a really common incorrect thing.
I seemed to recall from school that there were a fixed number of gramatically correct contractions, and you couldn’t make them on the fly. Also, the structure is very rarely if ever used in the books I read, which suggests it’s incorrect.
So, I guess the consensus is that it’s correct in that everyone uses it and everyone understands it, but is generally supposed to be avoided in more formal writing.
Though many web pages put that space in there, it should be 'Swonderful, 'smarvellous…
'Swell.
In general, one is supposed to avoid contractions in formal writing. It’s not a grammar rule – it’s an issue of style. But there’s nothing technically incorrect with using such contractions.
Hmm… what if contractions were used regularly in formal occasions? It might sound something like this…
Actually the possessive is also a case of the apostrophe indicating letters that have been left out. After all that’s what apostrophe means: A turning away, or a reference to something missing.
To find the missing letters of the possessive you need to go back to Old English. The common ending in Old English for the possessive genitive was es. Thus, Edwardes sword becomes * Edward’s sword*.