• jettrscga@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The reason it feels wrong is that “are” is the main verb in the sentence and shouldn’t be contracted. You are only supposed to contract auxiliary verbs like “you’re eating already” where eating is the main verb and are is auxiliary.

      Edit: (I used a bad example because “eating” is a noun, as pointed out below.)

      Un-edit: The example’s correct, “eating” is a verb in this context.

      Also, I’m thoroughly confused about who’s saying “you’re already” in this comic.

        • DaGeek247@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Yes. It doesn’t work as “you’re already” and really, it doesn’t work all thay well as “you are already” either. This is almost yoda levels of rearrangement.

          It makes the most sense as “you already are”.

        • hakase@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Yup, this is likely a phonological restriction in addition to a syntactic one, though it’s worth noting that the copula (the “be” verb) shows a lot of idiosyncratic behavior in different contexts in different dialects of English.

          It seems that this pattern may have something to do with stress assignment within a predicate, but I’m not sure what the conditioning environment is at first glance. Any English phonologists here who can shed some more light on this?

          • Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            I’m no expert, but I think “you’re already” doesn’t work because the “anti-stress” on the contraction tells us the focus is later, but the focus of “already” is actually on the “are” in “you’re”. It trips us up because it sneaks the focus past us and then just ends the sentence before the focus the stress told us about arrives.

            It may also be because “you are already” is a variant of the sentence “you are” which can’t be contracted, so the contraction insinuates “you’re already [something]”. It makes us parse a different sentence structure than it is, then we get confused when the sentence ends early.

        • quindraco@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          “Eating” isn’t a verb, either. The person you’re responding to just got some terms wrong, the underlying idea about contractions is correct.

    • slazer2au@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Also, is the cat saying it? The speak marker points to the cat on the third frame not the dude on the third or fourth.

    • bleistift2@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      The fact that you seem to not have seen this before indicates that you cannot actually always contract ‘you’ and ‘are’. ‘Cannot’ in the sense that most people don’t do it and you will get grades deducted if you do it when learning English as a second language.

      • TSG_Asmodeus (he, him)@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The fact that you seem to not have seen this before indicates that you cannot actually always contract ‘you’ and ‘are’.

        I’m still re-reading this sentence. How does not having seen this before indicate what you can or can not do?

        • thorbot@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I love how they are trying to correct bad grammar with even worse grammar

          seem to not have seen

          cannot actually always

          🤡

        • bleistift2@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          I retract the word ‘indicate.’ It’s not proof, but if you haven’t seen a phrase before, despite n years of reading and/or speaking a language, it means that that phrase is uncommon. If that phrase also looks like it should be used more (I’m referring to “you’re” being very common in different sentence structures), that’s a strong hint that the phrase doesn’t exist or has some very different meaning in that context.

        • DaGeek247@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Because language is a thing that everyone agrees on, together. If nobody else is using the words like that, maybe you shouldn’t either.

          • TSG_Asmodeus (he, him)@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            The fact that you seem to not have seen this before indicates that you cannot actually always contract ‘you’ and ‘are’.

            This is the line I am referring to, not any specific word. This sentence is nonsensical:

            “The fact you seem to not have seen this before indicates…” followed by “that you cannot always contract ‘you’ and ‘are.’”

            How are those related? If someone hasn’t seen this before… it indicates … grammar rules? How does not seeing it indicate a grammar rule?

        • bleistift2@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          I wasn’t trying to imply that contracting is always wrong. Rather, it is not always right.

          In the case of “it’s what it’s”, the “it is” part is being stressed, so contracting it is weird.

          This is why I find contracting “You are already“ weird. To me, the stress is on the are. However, after reading and re-reading the statement in my head, I can feel people stressing the already instead. To those, “You’re already” would probably be fine.