My wife always gets mad when I point out that the dog sits around all day, demands the food off of her plate, and constantly interrupts her when he is bored or wants attention, but she spends hours doting over him and praising him. I, on the other hand, work all day to sustain our lifestyle, spend a lot of my “leisure” time doing chores around the house, and am mindful to be polite, but I barely get a hug and “I love you”.
…
For anyone who is in doubt, I mean it in jest. I don’t need constant reassurance and reward to keep being a responsible adult. Also, though she will not admit it, she knows the dog is much cuter than me.
Plenty of cats will let you snuggle and love like this (not all ofc) Cats are more of a companionship, they will only let people they trust love on them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think your example is actually correct. Eating CAN be a noun, but in your example it is a present participle, a type of verb. It would be a noun if eating was the subject, ie: “eating is fun,” where it would be a gerund. teacherblog.ef.com/grammar-recap-intro-to-gerunds…
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?
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.
![You will pay for this [Salo Comics]](https://startrek.website/pictrs/image/859bd19d-fce2-49f3-8146-bdeab35d1216.jpeg){kind=link}
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