Re: is, is
- From: Evan Kirshenbaum <kirshenbaum@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2007 20:39:27 -0700
matt271829-news@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
Recently I've been noticing how an awful lot of people say "is, is"
when "is" by itself would do, in sentences such as:
"The problem is, is that..."
"What I'm trying to say is, is that..."
(The "is, is" is not indicating hesitation here.)
I'm not sure if this is a new thing, or if I've only just become
aware of it. Has anyone else particularly noticed this fashion?
I started noticing it in the late '80s, which is when I believe it
started becoming very common, at least in the San Francisco area, and
I appear to have first discussed it here a little over fifteen years
ago (5/21/92). In that article, I noted that I had recently caught an
example in a _Mork and Mindy_ rerun, which would push it back to
mid-'70s, although it doesn't seem to have been common then.
I wonder if the habit is carried over from sentences like:
"What the problem is, is that..."
where "is, is" does seem necessary (albeit ugly). Or perhaps the
root cause it that it's natural to say "is ... is" when you *are*
hesitating, and people carry that over even when they're not?
While that's almost certainly the ultimate genesis, I suspect that
there's actually a lot more going on here. Although I haven't thought
about it for a while, I actually think that this is probably one of
the more interesting developments in English grammar. Some
interesting points:
- Most speakers who use it don't realize that they do unless you
point it out to them, consider it wrong when you do, and then go
on not hearing themselves saying it.
- Most people don't notice it most of the time, even when they use
it.
- Speakers appear to be split between those who use it almost
mandatorily and those who essentially never use it.
- There doesn't appear to be any correlation I can find between
use and any other characteristic, including race, age (including
people in their 60s and 70s), dialect, profession, or education.
(One person I know who uses it has a degree in English. Several
have Ph.Ds.) People who do live harmoniously with those who
don't.
- The late onset implies that it was actually acquired in
adulthood.
- Some (but not all) speakers who use it add a similar resumptive
"is" in other tenses, leading to "was is" and, less often, "will
be is". (For a brief period in the late '80s I heard "was was",
but I haven't noticed that since then.)
- I've heard people (who use it) add parentheticals between the
"is"s, as in "My question is (and if you're going to cover it
later, feel free to put it off till then) is whether ..."
- It's now been in the wild long enough that some of the users
almost certainly learned it by modeling their speech after that
of their parents, also users.
Linguistically, I'm not sure exactly what to make of it. As near as I
can tell, what's happening is that "is", in some hard-to-define
circumstances, is being prepended as a marker before the verbal
complement. Sort of a preposition. This would explain the invariance
under tense and also the ability to insert parentheticals.
Psychologically, I think it's even more interesting, as the fact that
it is acquired in adulthood without the speaker being aware of using
it (or even of having heard it) implies that it's actually a sort of
linguistic "parasite". Speakers go through their lives never saying
it, and then, having heard it (but not noticed hearing it), it becomes
a mandatory part of their productive grammar. But even then, it
remains largely invisible, edited out of the perception of both the
speaker and (most) hearers. And it infects other susceptible
grammars.
Nearly as interesting is the fact that it doesn't do it for everybody.
This reinforces the model of language acquisition that says that what
you do when you acquire a first language is build up a grammar that
can handle the utterances you hear and that produces utterances that
are understandable by others. But since the convergence is at the
level of surface forms, there's no reason to believe that the
underlying grammar is necessarily the same, or even similar. A
parasite like this, which only infects some people would seem to imply
that there are (at least) two radically different ways to do part of
English, one of which is susceptible to being changed by it and one of
which isn't.
--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
HP Laboratories |And the wildest dreams of Kew
1501 Page Mill Road, 1U, MS 1141 | are the facts of Khatmandhu,
Palo Alto, CA 94304 |And the crimes of Clapham
| chaste in Martaban.
kirshenbaum@xxxxxxxxxx |
(650)857-7572 | Rudyard Kipling
http://www.kirshenbaum.net/
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