Something I have noticed that ESL speakers sometimes do is to misuse contractions - specifically, word contractions that would be valid in some positions in a sentence, but are not valid in other positions (typically, where they trail the sentence).
Take for example the statement by Gloria Gaynor (or Popeye):
“I am what I am”
It’s valid to change this to "I’m what I am’, but not “I am what I’m” (or “I’m what I’m”)
“You are so beautiful to me” goes to “You’re so beautiful to me”
"“How beautiful you are” does not go to “How beautiful you’re”
“It is beginning to look a lot like Christmas” is already actually “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas”
“What a wonder it is” would never be changed to “What a wonder it’s”
And this seems to be a fairly solid and unexcepted rule in English, which is a rarity; the contraction only works when it has something following that it works upon - but what is this rule? What’s actually happening here?
Very good question. I’m a certified EFL* teacher, and we often tell students “English has few rules but many tendencies.” I don’t believe there is a hard-and-fast rule governing the examples you cite, other than “That’s just the way we say them.” If there is such a rule, I’ve never encountered it. Maybe someone else has?
I think it’s to do with the rhythm of our sentences. In all of your examples, there is some stress on the last word, not fully stressed necessarily, but more stress than you get with a contraction.
In the glory days of Hong Kong film nerdery in the 90s, I watched hundreds of hilariously-subtitled Cantonese laserdiscs and this wasn’t unheard of. I think it was the first A Better Tomorrow that had the classic exchange:
Isn’t this an artifact of ending a sentence in a preposition? It’s defined as ending a sentence with a word governing a noun or pronoun (or in this case two words that can result in a contraction).
For example from the OP, “What a wonder it is” could be rearranged to be, say, “it is such a wonder”. In that case the contraction works fine.
I know that ending a sentence with a preposition is not really a hard-and-fast grammar non-no, or as Winston Churchill said “This is the type of errant pedantry up with which I will not put.” But doing it can result in the type of English language oddity you get here.
I agree with a and b, but I find “They asked me to resign, but I didn’t want tuh” perfectly acceptable.
The question is very interesting and I don’t think any of the proposed answers is really convincing, I don’t. And I certainly don’t think it has anything to do with ending sentences with prepositions, which is a made-up rule not obeyed in any dialect of English I am familiar with. When I try to think of an explanation, I can’t.
I think what @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness linked to is the correct explanation - syntactic stranding.
I think this is true too, and this stress is a consequence of the syntactic stranding.
In the case of the negative form of verbs, it seems to me that some contraction is allowed because there is never “complete” contraction - enough always remains that the either the verb or the negation is a stressed syllable.
I thought he was clever, and sure enough he is.
** I thought he was clever, and sure enough he’s.
I thought he was clever but it turns out he isn’t.
I thought he was clever but it turns out he’s not.
The verb is “stranded” at the end of the sentence as the crux of the statement, and thus needs emphasis. It’s impossible to stress the verb when is contracted into “he’s” in the second sentence, so that is not allowed. But the contractions “he isn’t” or “he’s not” are okay, because enough remains that you can still place stress on the crux of the sentence.
More examples demonstrating that the rule is to allow a final contraction only when enough remains that it is still possible to place emphasis on the stranded verb (or negation), which is the semantic crux of the sentence.
She forgot to take her pill when she should’ve.
She texted her ex today, but I think she really shouldn’t’ve.
The first one is not a negation, and the second one is a double contraction. But they are both allowed, because enough remains that the appropriate stress may be placed on that syllable at the end of the sentence, the semantic crux.
