I noticed this on a refrigerator magnet today and had a knee-jerk chuckle response at the perceived grammar error. Then I thought about it and couldn’t figure out why it was an error. “You are what you eat” is ok, so why does “You’re what you eat” hurt my ears?
There are plenty of situations where “you’re” can be used to start off a sentence:
You’re right!
You’re late.
You’re fat/bald/ugly.
But in all of these cases the stress seems to be on adjective. In the case of “You are what you eat”, the stress is shifted to the linking verb (are), I suppose to stress the equality of (you = what you eat).
Is that why it sounds wrong to make “You are” into a contraction in this case, or is there a grammar rule I’m forgetting about? Are there any other cases where we ought not to use contractions even though it might be grammatically correct to do so?
I don’t think it’s ungrammatical, we’re just used to hearing it uncontracted and it sounds more balanced that way.
You ARE
what you EAT.
Take a somewhat similar example: “it is what it is.” “It’s what it is” sounds odd, but “it’s what it looks like” or “it’s what you make of it” don’t, IMO.
The phrase is meant to use grammatical parallelism to make the connection between being (“are”) and eating (“eat”). If you contract one side it breaks the parallelism.
In “You are what you eat” the emphasis is traditionally placed on “ARE”. That gives it epigrammatic weight. It claims to address the issue of personal essence.
Contracting “you are” to “you’re” tends to emphasize the word “WHAT” and changes the expression into a boring, if equally true, statement.
Construction grammar (CxG) deals with phrases like this (mostly idioms). Many grammarians/linguistics in this field (Goldberg and Lakoff spring to mind) would argue that the saying ‘you are what you eat’ exists as one lexical entry in your mental lexicon. This is as opposed to the usual way in which we form sentences, by choosing individual words from the lexicon and putting them together in a grammatical way.
It is a ‘fixed expression’, like ‘kicked the bucket’. It would also sound wrong to change other parts of the expression, such as changing ‘eat’ to ‘consume’.
Yes, but being a “fixed expression,” in this case, is not the only reason why it “sounds” ungrammatical (as opposed to actually being ungrammatical). It’s because the copula is linking to a noun phrase.
On the other hand, there are times when contractions will be ungrammatical regardless. For example:
*A: It sure is hot outside, isn’t it?
B: *Yes, it’s.
*
Rather than:
*A: It sure is hot outside, isn’t it?
B: Yes, it is.
*
I don’t know if this applies to ‘you’re what you eat.’
“You’re what you’ve always wanted to be”
"You’re what the french call “les incompetents”
“You’re what I’m looking for”
All these sound grammatical to me. If ‘You are what you eat’ did not already exist as a popular expression, ‘you’re what you eat’ would sound fine too. Although maybe this is down to your experience of the English language and what you consider grammatical?
Yeah, “fixed expressions” can sound wrong when rephrased, even if the rephrasing is perfectly grammatical. You can come up with reverse examples where unpacking the contraction sounds wrong - “All is well that ends well.”? Like the OP’s case, that also breaks the meter of the thing.
When young children are learning to speak, they often learn fixed expressions which may seem like they are talking in strings of words, but really it’s just one lexical entry to use the terminology here.
For example, playing “peek-a-boo” with my son, he quickly picked up “Here he is” well before he could put two let alone three words together in a string. For him “Here he is” is just one long word.