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In the Slate article, The Curse of “You May Also Like”, the following sentence has a contraction of there is that doesn't sit well with my ear for American or British English. I wonder whether any of our native English-speaking users find it acceptable and grammatical. I think it's not idiomatic, is ungrammatical, and is unacceptable, but I may just be too old and ornery to cozy down to this level of change in language usage. NB: I first coined the phrase cozy down to and then found an apt example of cozy down on the Internet.

Amazon's knowledge, however, goes deeper than Netflix's: Since it also runs a site where we buy books, it knows everything that there's to know about our buying behavior and the prices that we are willing to pay.

Is this acceptable?

Araucaria - Him
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    It certainly isn't idiomatic. I don't know if I could argue that it's ungrammatical because it is a contraction of there is which is grammatical. When speaking I think it's easy to slur the two together and wind up with something that sounds like the contraction. But in writing I'd avoid it. – Jim Mar 03 '13 at 08:45
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    I find it unacceptable because the idiom is "to know everything there is to know" – mplungjan Mar 03 '13 at 09:50
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    Is this deemed different from eg

    There's no accounting for taste ...
    ... like there's no tomorrow ... There's no place like home (ToTo).

    And similar, which are rife, relatively anyway :-).

     – Russell McMahon Mar 03 '13 at 10:25
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    I feel it IS different. It's what it's does not work for me either - It's what it is works better but It is what it is works best – mplungjan Mar 03 '13 at 10:30
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    @Jim: Yes, the contraction itself is fine in the proper context, just as "I'm" is grammatical in "I'm hungry" but impossible in "She's not hungry, but I'm*". –  Mar 03 '13 at 10:35
  • I guess I'm alone in this, but that there's doesn't bother me one bit. – Marthaª Mar 03 '13 at 15:08
  • @Martha: May I suggest one of these and one of these}? --- :-) –  Mar 03 '13 at 15:14
  • @BillFranke, (1) THWACK!, (2) Keep in mind that I'm around non-native speakers almost all the time. It's refreshing to encounter purposeful "misuses" of the language, rather than misuses that stem from stubborn ignorance. – Marthaª Mar 04 '13 at 16:40
  • @Marthaª: Ouch! I knew somebody from Wilkes-Barre once about 50 years ago, but her English was pretty good. I live in Taiwan, where even some of the native speakers I know were born & initially raised in Poland for a few years before emigrating with their families to No. America. And I edit Chinese English every day (and have for the last 16 years here). My wife & son are native speakers of Taiwanese & Chinese, & before coming here, I spent 10 years in Tokyo with another native Chinese-speaker wife. I know how Chinglish & Japanglish can twist the tongue & ears of native English speakers. –  Mar 04 '13 at 16:59
  • Certainly that can be viewed as an accurate transcription of perfectly idiomatic and proper speech. The problem is that writing "there's" in that context is not idiomatic -- nothing wrong with speaking it. The issue in question is whether the intent is to have an accurate transcription of spoken English (which is not necessary in the above context) or a written version which is readily interpreted by the reader. In this case probably the latter is appropriate, but in other situations not. – Hot Licks Feb 23 '16 at 18:15

5 Answers5

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As usual, this sentence has been tampered with. Extensively.

Stripping it to the bone, here's a much simpler sentence with the same rub:

  • *A knows everything that there's to know about Y.

And it is ungrammatical. But it's hard to see why. That's because the object of know is

  • everything that there's to know about Y.

which means

  • 'there is/are things that one needs to know about Y, and we're talking about all of these things'

or, before There-insertion,

  • 'things that one needs to know about Y exist, and we're talking about all of these things'

That is, dummy there can only occur as a Subject in an existential or locative clause.
If dummy there is followed by a noun phrase, then there is can be contracted to there's.

  • There is food on the table. ~ There's food on the table.

But if "movement rules" like embedded question formation remove the NP following there is, it can't be contracted to there's.

  • You can have what there is. ~ *You can have what there's.

since the purpose of contracting a predictable dummy like there is is to save syllables at the beginning of the sentence, so as to get to the important information faster. At the end of a sentence, however, such a contraction has no purpose and therefore doesn't occur.

John Lawler
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    Thanks for hitting the nail on the head for why this isn’t quite kosher. It’s pretty subtle but definitely there. – tchrist Mar 03 '13 at 19:03
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    This is a persuasive argument. I note, though, that some contractions sound odd (to my subjective ear) even in the absence of any question of dummy pronoun use. For instance, the sentence "I've the answer," sounds as clunky to me as "everything that there's to know," even though both "I have the answer" and "I've got the answer" sound fine. – Sven Yargs Mar 03 '13 at 19:57
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    Quite right. That's a different rule, for contracting the auxiliary verb have to -'ve; and it doesn't apply to the sense of have that means 'possess', just like the American English past participle gotten does not apply to uses of get that mean 'possess'. That is, have in its meaningful sense is not an auxiliary verb, and can't normally contract. – John Lawler Mar 03 '13 at 22:30
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    i think you nailed it with the last paragraph. however, any time "there is" exists, you should be allowed to contract it, otherwise we are making rules simply for the purpose of having rules. we don't contract you can have what there is simply because there's nothing following it (and thus it sounds weird), but not because it's necessarily ungrammatical. – Erich Feb 17 '15 at 01:04
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    "Should be allowed" doesn't really count for much beside "gets said". – John Lawler Feb 17 '15 at 02:15
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    John and @SvenYargs The answer is surely nothing to do with there particularly, but more that that there is ___ to know is a relative clause where the complement of the verb be has been deleted? The same kinda problem would happen with I recognised him for the charlatan which he is--> *I recognised him for the charlatan which he's. You can't have a contraction (of an auxiliary) before an ellipsis site, no? – Araucaria - Him Oct 14 '21 at 02:28
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    That's probly the big picture, yes. Though I would call it an extraction site. – John Lawler Oct 14 '21 at 19:47
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It's perfectly grammatical; but it falls badly on the ear.

As mplungjan observes, the phrase is knows everything there is to know, which has a fixed rhythm: a half line of common meter, ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ . This version preserves the meter, but it intrudes a that which throws the stress on there.

But in natural speech, the construction there is is almost always unstressed when dummy there is in play. In that case, contraction is natural.

There's no place like home.

When the construction needs to be stressed, to assert the existence of something, it is uncontracted and the stress falls on is. Consequently, there is stressed only when it is the locative adverb:

There's what I was looking for!

This is a clumsy effort to look colloquial by a tin-eared writer with a typical corporate fondness for superfluous thats.

StoneyB on hiatus
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Egads – what's the written world coming to?

Indeed, your excerpt made me wince on first read, but I wanted to investigate further before I passed judgement, so I did the quasi-obligatory Ngram:

enter image description here

Interestingly enough, that red line isn't flat along the bottom; there are scatterings of instances in the literature. However, when I checked those, the great preponderance of them were coincidental, bridging across the period between two sentences (see screen shot at the bottom of my answer, or click here to see even more).

I did find manage to find one example that uses the contraction similar to your quote:

enter image description here

however, in that instance, the author is quoting an interviewee, so even that example only shows that “everything there's” might occur in conversation – but that wouldn't necessarily make it acceptable news copy.

Speaking of news, when I was mulling this over, I did remember that famous New York Times tagline:

enter image description here

It's funny how it seems okay to contract that is, or it is, in such contexts, whereas contracting there is sounds more “off.” Perhaps it wouldn't be that way, if ’twas just used more?

enter image description here

J.R.
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    For everything, there's a bad way ... and a good way is I think perfectly acceptable. There's the right way ... the wrong way ... and the Marine way is another example. The problem isn't the contraction, it's the stress. – StoneyB on hiatus Mar 03 '13 at 10:30
  • @Stoney: Good comment. Incidentally, I found that structure much more readable after you inserted the comma after the word everything. Without the comma, it took me a moment to figure out how that should be parsed. – J.R. Mar 03 '13 at 10:43
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It's bad. I've seen the badness attributed to the gap following the contracted form -- "... there's [gap] to know", where the gap is created by the relative pronoun that is removed from this place. Naturally, that came from the MIT direction, since it doesn't make sense. My theory about this (and probably other people's) is that the problem is losing a stressed vowel due to contraction. We start with "... there is something ] to know", where stress comes at the end of the constituent indicated by the right bracket in my schematic representation. If it weren't in a relative construction, that would put stress on "something", and the preceding "is" would not be stressed, so that we could contract the "is" and wind up with " ... there's 1something ] to know". No problem.

However, the "something" is relativized and lost, leaving " ... there 1is ] to know, and now the "is" is stressed, since it has come to be at the end of a constituent. That prevents the vowel being lost, so you can't contract.

I think this is a pleasing theory, since stress on a vowel preventing its deletion seems to me to be a natural constraint on contraction.

Unfortunately, I recall from when I was working on this, there are other examples which seem to favor the gap theory I mentioned above. I can't recall crucial examples right now, but maybe you can think of some.

Also, in some other cases it looks like you can contract a stressed vowel, and the stress on the vowel just gets moved onto a contiguous surviving syllable. "No, I cannot go" -> "No, I can't go".

Greg Lee
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  • Aren't those the same thing Greg? Finite auxiliaries must be stressed when not followed by their Complement. When followed by a gap because their Complement's been moved, they therefore must be stressed. When their Complement's been moved they're also now appearing at the end of a constituent. Aren't these all the same thing, or am I missing a crucial something or other? Your explanation sounds good to me ... – Araucaria - Him Feb 23 '16 at 18:14
  • @Araucaria, no, obviously being at the end of a constituent is not the same thing as being followed by a gap. Even if one could not find an example where one condition but not the other held true, they still wouldn't be the same thing. – Greg Lee Feb 23 '16 at 19:48
  • Well, I was assuming that we were talking about examples like these, not examples in general. It's plainly obvious that the gap theory can't be correct if it's meant to mean that there is some sort of gap rule. That would require a host of other rules to explain the same phenomenon when it occurred where there's no gaps. Like when there's verb phrase ellipsis for example (see my answer below which precede my comment here). – Araucaria - Him Feb 24 '16 at 09:02
  • @Araucaria, I don't know what "gap rule" means. A gap is a feature of sentence structure created when an extraction or movement rule applies. (Personally, I do not believe gaps exist, but many syntacticians do.) – Greg Lee Feb 24 '16 at 14:13
  • You don't believe in gaps? I'm having deja vu. Had this discussion yesterday with a teaching colleague. What I put to him was, if we fill in the gap in an RC, for example with a resumptive pronoun, we don't know where the relativised element is: "The man who he punched him" for example. It is literally only the omission of that element and the space it leaves in the syntax that tells us what the relativised element is --> We can clarify the earlier sentence by literally putting in a gap/omission in the syntax where this element would be --> "The man who punched him" or "The man who he punched" – Araucaria - Him Feb 24 '16 at 15:05
  • I know lots of people don't believe in gaps, but I can'y get my head round what there is to not believe in? (scratches head) (shrugs) – Araucaria - Him Feb 24 '16 at 15:13
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    @Araucaria, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, the book, gives an explicit account of gaps. They are pre-terminal nodes in a tree which dominate e, the empty symbol. It's good to have a concrete idea of what you don't believe in. – Greg Lee Feb 24 '16 at 15:53
  • But many people who don't subscribe to GPSG still believe in gaps. – Araucaria - Him Feb 24 '16 at 22:14
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    @Araucaria, I doubt that the authors of GPSG subscribe to gaps. I think they were concerned that gaps would be thought to be beyond the scope of a non-transformational theory, and just wanted to show that they, too, could have gaps. I don't recall the original motivation for gaps, in case that's what you're asking about. Weird MIT stuff. – Greg Lee Feb 24 '16 at 22:33
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It's ungrammatical and here's why. Finite auxiliary verbs must be stressed—and therefore can't be contracted with a preceding word— when they aren't followed by their Complement. This separation might be because their Complement has moved into a different position in the sentence. It might be because it has been deleted due to ellipsis or it might be because the Complement has been replaced by an anaphoric gap.

Complement preposed:

  • It is here.
  • It's here.
  • Here it is. (Complement Here has been preposed)
  • *Here it's. (Contraction ungrammatical)

Complement deleted:

  • Is he coming tomorrow? Yes, I think he is coming tomorrow.
  • Is he coming tomorrow? Yes, I think he's coming tomorrow.
  • Is he coming tomorrow? Yes, I think he is. (Complement he is coming tomorrow deleted)
  • Is he coming tomorrow? *Yes, I think he's. (Contraction ungrammatical)

Complement replaced by gap (in relative clause):

  • There is commitment in this team of ours
  • There's commitment in this team of ours.
  • I appreciate all the commitment that there is ___ in this team of ours. (Complement commitment replaced by gap)
  • *I appreciate all the commitment that there's ___ in this team of ours. (contraction ungrammatical)

This last example illustrates what has happened in the Original Poster's sentence, where there is a gap in the relative clause after there is. It is because this Complement is missing that we cannot contract the word is here.

Araucaria - Him
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