1024. It often sounds weird if you try to end a sentence with a contraction like "you're" and "I'm." We look at why! Then, get ready for Halloween with the language of fear.
1024. It often sounds weird if you try to end a sentence with a contraction like "you're" and "I'm." We look at why! Then, get ready for Halloween with the language of fear.
The "contractions" segment is by Neal Whitman, an independent writer and consultant specializing in language and grammar and a member of the Reynoldsburg, Ohio, school board. You can search for him by name on Facebook, or find him on his blog at literalminded.wordpress.com.
The "language of fear" segment is by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." A version of this story originally appeared on Psychology Today, and you can find her at valeriefridland.com.
🔗 Share your familect recording in a WhatsApp chat.
🔗 Watch my LinkedIn Learning writing courses.
🔗 Subscribe to the newsletter.
🔗 Take our advertising survey.
🔗 Get the edited transcript.
🔗 Get Grammar Girl books.
🔗 Join Grammarpalooza. Get ad-free and bonus episodes at Apple Podcasts or Subtext. Learn more about the difference.
| HOST: Mignon Fogarty
| VOICEMAIL: 833-214-GIRL (833-214-4475).
| Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.
| Theme music by Catherine Rannus.
| Grammar Girl Social Media Links: YouTube. TikTok. Facebook.Threads. Instagram. LinkedIn. Mastodon.
Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today, we're going to talk about why it often sounds weird to end a sentence with a contraction, and then in honor of Halloween, we're going to talk about the language of fear.
This first segment is by Neal Whitman.
by Neal Whitman
Have you ever wondered why is it OK to say, "You’re correct" or "You’re welcome" but not "I’m smarter than you’re’?" Why does it seem like we can't end a sentence with that contraction for "you are"?
This isn’t so much a question about grammar as it is about English phonology. It reminds me of a very short poem I read one time, which seems to have been written by someone named Ethel Barnett DeVito in the mid-20th century, though I haven’t been able to track it down fully. It seems to be a complaint about either highways or checkout lines, and goes:
Wherever the place, whatever the time,
Every lane moves but the one where I’m.
The poem is funny, at least in my opinion, not only because it’s so true, but also because in order to make a rhyme, the author has deliberately used the contraction “I’m,” which just doesn’t sound right in this situation. But why doesn’t it?
Well, the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language describes the situation like this:
Some English words, in particular function words such as pronouns, prepositions, and auxiliary verbs, have both strong and weak forms. For example, the strong form of the pronoun “you” is “you,” the way you pronounce it when you’re reading it all by itself.
However, it also has a weak form, which you’ll hear in sentences like “What do ya want for lunch?” Did you hear how it was pronounced “yuh”? Sometimes this weak form is even spelled Y-A.
This is sometimes called careless pronunciation, but there are actually rules that speakers follow that prohibit weak forms in certain contexts. For example, if Aardvark were to ask Squiggly, “Who’s your buddy, Squiggly? Come one, who’s your pal?” Squiggly might say “You are,” or just “you,” but he wouldn’t say “Ya are” or “ya.” This context calls for stress on “you,” and the weak form just isn’t suitable for that.
The Cambridge Grammar notes that in addition to being available whenever a speaker wants to stress a word for emphasis, the strong form of a word is required in a handful of specific grammatical situations. In particular, it states that prepositions are stressed when they are the last element in a prepositional phrase, and auxiliary verbs when they are the last element in a verb phrase.
For example, the preposition “to” has a weak form that sounds like “tuh.” It’s OK to use the weak form in a phrase like “We went to [“tuh”] the movies,” but not in a sentence like “Fenster is the person you should talk to”: It just sounds funny to say “Fenster is the person you should talk tuh.”
For examples with auxiliary verbs, we have “I’m smarter than you are” and “the one where I am,” with the strong forms “are” and “am.”
Now as it happens, the weak forms of “are” and “am” in “I’m smarter than you’re” and “the one where I’m” are still not the weak forms. If they were, those lines would be “I’m smarter than you ’er” and “the one where I ’em.” Did you hear the difference? I didn’t use the strong forms “are” and “am,” but I did still pronounce a vowel.
If you read the transcript, you’ll see that I spelled these forms as “er” and “em” to show the pronunciation. But in “you’re” and “I’m,” there’s no vowel at all! “Are” and “am” have turned into just the consonant sounds R and M. These are examples of a weaker-than-weak form that some auxiliary verbs have, a form so weak that it doesn’t even have a vowel of its own anymore, and has to get one from a so-called host word. In “you’re” and “I’m,” the host words are the “you” and the “I.” The technical term for these super-reduced forms is “clitic,” from the Greek word meaning “to lean,” because these words depend on, or lean on, their hosts. You can also hear auxiliary verb clitics as the final consonant sound in contractions such as “she’s,” “he’d,” “they’ve,” and “we’ll.”
If you can’t even get an ordinary weak form of an auxiliary verb at the end of a verb phrase, you certainly aren’t going to get the cliticized versions in words like “you’re” and “I’m.” In fact, this rule even sheds some more light on the “where at” construction that we covered in episode 799. In that episode, we noted that “where at” neatly fills in the pattern involving “where” with other prepositions: “Where is she from?” has a preposition at the end, and so do some questions that use “where” to refer to a destination, such as “Where did they swim to?” Seen in that context, questions like “Where are you at?” don’t stand out quite as much.
Now we can also say that if you start to ask a “where” question and accidentally use a weak or cliticized form of “is” or “are,” you’re going to have a goofy-sounding sentence unless you find something else to finish it. “Where’s it?”and “I don’t know where you’re” are just going to confuse your listeners. The “at” can be seen as a rescue device to save the sentences, to turn them into the much more acceptable “Where’s it at?” and “I don’t know where you’re at.”
All this still doesn’t quite answer the question of exactly why this rule of no weak prepositions or auxiliary verbs at the end of a phrase should be in effect. I don’t have an answer for that, and if any linguists out there know of some research that’s been done on this question, please leave a comment telling us about it. Whatever the reason, though, it’s still one of those interesting language rules that speakers usually follow unconsciously.
That segment was written by Neal Whitman, an independent writer and consultant specializing in language and grammar and a member of the Reynoldsburg, Ohio, school board. You can search for him by name on Facebook, or find him on his blog at literalminded.wordpress.com.
Reference:
Huddleston, Rodney, and Pullum, Geoffrey K. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. 2001. Cambridge University Press. pp. 1603-1604.
by Valerie Fridland
Lately, there seems to be plenty to fear in the world: threats of war, political divisiveness, mass shootings. But it turns out that how we talk about what we fear might actually moderate our reactions, giving us clues about how we're socially and culturally conditioned to experience fear.
The word "fear" has a long history in English. In Anglo-Saxon times, “fær,” as it was pronounced, primarily referred to impending peril or sudden danger. But the root of the word dates a lot farther back than English, all the way to a much more ancient root, "pēr," from a hypothesized language known as Indo-European that existed about 6,000 years ago. Language researchers believe this root meant “to pass through or travel,” suggesting that fear ultimately developed from the sense of a sudden (frightening) experience you passed through.
The perseverance of this word over time certainly suggests it usefully describes a longstanding human emotion, but research suggests how different people conceptualize fear is less consistent than you might think.
For example, you might assume that basic emotion words like “love” or “fear” translate the same way across languages, but whether cultures view these emotions positively or negatively can vary based on what people have learned to associate with those words.
Some researchers who are interested in this question have looked at what is called "colexification patterns" across languages. Colexification occurs when a language has more than one concept associated with a word, typically arising from how and in what contexts people use those words.
For example, in English, “anxious” is often used to mean “worried” (as in “I am anxious about the test”) but also to mean “eager,” as in “I am anxious to see that new movie.” Thus, it colexifies those two meanings. However, in Dargwa (a language spoken in Dagestan), the word that means “anxious” can’t mean “eager” but can be used to mean “regret.”
This suggests that many English speakers conflate anxiety and eagerness in a way not experienced by Dargwa speakers – and, since being eager is not always a bad thing, they may not view anxiety as negatively as Dargwa speakers.
In looking at such patterns across the major language families (languages that are related historically), researchers found that the word “fear” was often associated with anxiety, envy and grief in Indo-European languages (the family including English). But in languages spoken in the Indonesian archipelago such as Malay, Tagalog, Balinese and Javanese, “fear” was more often associated with just the concept of surprise.
In other words, in languages where “fear” also means a more positive thing, like “surprise,” than a more negative thing, like “grief,” having “fear” of something may not trigger a negative, or as negative, an emotional response.
Another fascinating finding is that hearing something scary in your native language seems to make you experience emotions like fear more intensely than hearing about it in a foreign language. This seems to be related to a richer encoding of experience in your native language than your brain does in a second language, and it could also be related to an increase in psychological distance to an event when a non-native language is used. In other words, our emotions tend to be more easily experienced and expressed in the language we grew up speaking.
This emotional distancing effect of a foreign language has long been noted – in fact, Freud wrote of bilingual patients shifting to their non-native language to describe anxiety inducing topics. However, this so-called “linguistic detachment” associated with using a foreign language has only recently been empirically studied.
In a 2018 study, researchers asked participants to complete a verbal fear-conditioning experiment in either their native or a foreign language to explore whether simply changing language reduced emotional reactivity, as measured by pupil dilation and sweat gland activity.
In the fear-conditioning part of the study, participants were told they might receive a mild electric shock when certain colored squares appeared on the screen while they were saying numbers aloud. (And don't worry — the participants didn't actually get shocked!).
But the study showed that, while both groups started sweating and their pupils started dilating when they heard the threat, it happened even more when they heard the threat in their native language.
As well, the initial response decreased more rapidly when the researchers used a foreign language. All of this suggests that hearing a threat in a foreign language may indeed decrease a person’s fear reaction.
The fact that how we talk about fear changes how we react to it certainly suggests there may be some value to trying to disrupt the language or associated meanings we use when talking about things that make us afraid. As well, some work (Argaman 2010) has suggested that fear increases our tendency to use self-focused language such as the use of “I” and “we” pronouns and to use more emotion words such as "happy," "sad," and "scared."
All of this may indicate that talking about what you are experiencing in scary situations helps to keep the fear under control – as might distancing yourself from fearful situations by using a second language, if you can. As well, how our language categorizes an emotion (in relation to other emotion concepts) seems to affect whether we tend to think of those emotions more negatively or more positively.
So, if you are looking for a good scare this Halloween, it's probably best to watch "Dracula" in your native language to get the full effect.
And here's a final fun fact for your Halloween trivia night: Universal Pictures made the original 1931 “Dracula” movie in both English and Spanish (Drácula), with the English version filming during the day, and the Spanish version filming at night using the same costumes and sets.
That segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." A version of this story originally appeared on Psychology Today, and you can find her at valeriefridland.com.
References
Argaman, O. (2010). Linguistic markers and emotional intensity. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 39, 89-99.
Chamberlain, Alex. (1899). On the Words for “Fear” in Certain Languages. A Study in Linguistic Psychology. The American Journal of Psychology, 10(2), 302–305.
Jackson, J. C. et al. (2019). Emotion semantics show both cultural variation and universal structure.Science 366,1517-1522.
Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M., (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18, 421-428.
Lindquist KA, Satpute AB, Gendron M. (2015). Does language do more than communicate emotion? Curr Dir Psychol Sci. Apr 1;24(2):99-108.
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “fear, n.”, September 2023. <https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/5502741422>>
Before we get to the familect, I have a call from a listener who probably has the answer to last week's question about the origin of the line from the "West Wing" TV show calling someone a "nervous old yalia."
Hi, this is in reference to the "West Wing," quote, "nervous old yalia."
I was thinking that actually it might be "helalia," which is, like, Yiddish for "crazy person," or one of the Yiddish words for "crazy person."
Okay, that's it. Thanks. Bye-bye.
Thanks so much for the call. That sounds reasonable to me!
And finally, I have a familect story from Jim.
I have a, it's not necessarily a familect, but rather a friend-ilect, as it's a shared term among close friends, not necessarily family. Although I do consider my friends my family.
The term is "Catherineism." A brief background, "Catherine" has been a friend of ours for about 40 years. She was raised without television. So she read a lot of books, but unless her parents articulated a specific term, she was left to her own devices to discriminate between similar sounding words and just plain mixed-up expressions. Her gaffs were often hilarious, as these examples I'm about to give will show.
"Would you please pass me the serenaded knife?" Obviously she meant "serrated."
"Bob won't stop calling me. He obviously totally dots on me," instead of "dotes."
The cat won't go away. He hoovers around me all the time." Well, she obviously meant "hovers."
"I love your decor. The wall scones really add an extra touch." I think she meant "sconces."
And lastly, "I think my date slipped a roonie in my drink." Which we know is actually called a Mickey. So a Mickey Roonie is the mixed-up expression.
Whenever she entertained us with her misspeaking, we added the word or expression to our ever-growing list of "Catherineisms," which we're committed to using to this day.
Anyway, hope you enjoyed them. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Jim. I definitely love hearing about friend-ilects too. Wherever these fun inside language stories come from is fine with me.
If you want to share your familect — or your friend-liect — a word or phrase you use just with your friends or just with your family, you can do it in a voice chat on WhatsApp or by calling the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL, and both of those are in the show notes.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Davina Tomlin and Nat Hoopes in marketing; Holly Hutchings in digital operations; Morgan Christianson in advertising; Brannan Goetschius, director of podcasts; and Dan Feierabend in audio, who likes classic punk rock.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and author of the tip-a-day book "The Grammar Daily." That's all. Thanks for listening.