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Not in the sense of "you are", but rather, I'm writing a poem for my girlfriend and I wrote this line: "Loving you's no hassle." I don't want to use anything incorrect, but I also feel like in this case, it works, and I could get away with it even if it is not considered a proper contraction.

wncslao
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    Yes, the rules of the grammar mean that you can 'contract' is with the Subject. In your sentence the Subject is the phrase "Loving you", and therefore we see/hear "Loving you's ..." The fact that the Subject ends with the word "you" isn't a problem. – Araucaria - Him Nov 21 '22 at 01:19
  • I believe the spelling you're looking for is "youse" (link rated R for excessive violence, be aware) – davidbak Nov 21 '22 at 16:15
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    Regardless of what the debate comes to, I would say writing a poem is definitely a time when you can use poetic license. – bubbleking Nov 21 '22 at 16:16
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    Making bread's no hassle. – ermanen Nov 21 '22 at 17:14
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    @Araucaria-Nothereanymore. You can’t ‘contract’ (*weaken) it as the last word in the sentence. Telling (you is not / you’s not / you isn’t) easy but showing you is.* <-- That one at the end cannot be weakened. No more so than can be I’m not hungry but Jim is., or even just plain Jim is. – tchrist Nov 21 '22 at 22:17
  • @tchrist That's correct the PAE construction requires weak stress on the auxiliary which prevents contractions. – Araucaria - Him Nov 21 '22 at 23:57
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    @davidbak, no, youse is the plural, not the contraction. – mcalex Nov 22 '22 at 07:15
  • @mcalex - try telling that to any of the guys in that video, if youse dare. – davidbak Nov 22 '22 at 14:47
  • The title of this question successfully tricked me into thinking about the 2nd-person pronoun instead of a noun phrase ending with "you" :) – Andrew T. Nov 22 '22 at 15:23
  • 'Loving you's no hassle' - poetry is not dead after all! – Michael Harvey Nov 22 '22 at 16:33
  • @davidbak mcalex is right. "Youse" is basically equivalent to "y'all". "Loving youse" would imply some sort of polyamorous situation. – JimmyJames Nov 22 '22 at 16:41
  • Was my link to a video clip showing the hardest of the hard-core Bronx (New York City) mobsters saying "youse" to a bunch of tough bikers not obviously a joke? Sorry! – davidbak Nov 22 '22 at 17:28

3 Answers3

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There is no very specific definition of what "proper contraction" means. From some people's point of view, it is most "proper" to avoid contractions altogether—despite the fact that contractions sound natural in many contexts in English.

Instead of talking about what is proper or not, what I can say for sure is that "Loving you's no hassle" is not an impossible type of contraction. It is a type of contraction that can definitely be heard from proficient English speakers. So I don't think that you need to avoid using it.

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, 2002) gives the following linguistic description of the relevant context:

The clitic ['s] may attach to the last word of the subject, which does not have to be an NP.

("Chapter 18: Inflectional Morphology and Related Matters", §6.2. Clitic versions of auxiliary verbs, page 1616)

(The subject of your sentence is Loving you.)

herisson
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  • Is that talking about the clitic ['s] for the possessive, or a contraction of is? In this case, both are fine. "Loving you's easy." "The dog that bit you's teeth were very yellow." Although it doesn't sound great because of the nonstandard word "youse" (plural "you"). – CJ Dennis Nov 21 '22 at 04:06
  • @CJDennis: The quoted sentence is only about the contraction of is, because it occurs in the context of the section about clitic forms of auxiliary verbs – herisson Nov 21 '22 at 04:09
  • If a constituent is a verb's subject, doesn't that imply that it's a NP? Saying a subject "does not have to be an NP" suggests a restriction on what a NP may consist of. – Rosie F Nov 21 '22 at 08:16
  • Also, you hafta distinguish between spelling, which is arbitrary and technological, and language, which is biological and evolved, and spoken. "Contraction" mostly refers to spelling. There are lotsa contractions that occur frequently in speech but normally don't in spelling. Largely because we don't know how they auta be spelled, given the junk heap of English spelling. – John Lawler Nov 21 '22 at 15:09
  • "From some people's point of view, it is most "proper" to avoid contractions altogether" is that you, Data? – FreeMan Nov 21 '22 at 15:41
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    @RosieF: Many linguists argue that things like verb phrases, clauses, etc. can be subjects, and that they should not be analyzed as converted into NPs in that context (basically, the idea is that we should reserve the term "NP/noun phrase" to phrases headed by nouns, and verb phrases or clauses are not headed by nouns) – herisson Nov 21 '22 at 16:22
  • @herisson Fair enough, though this approach looks as if it relies on the concept of "part of speech" (e.g. noun), together with an analogous extension of that concept to phrases (e.g. NP). I thought that that concept was deprecated these days. – Rosie F Nov 21 '22 at 17:21
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Yes, and it's been done. A quick Google of 'lyrics "loving you's"' shows:

I do see cases of these written with "is" spelled out, and in some cases with the apostrophe just missing, but it appears the contracted form is how these were originally published.

CCTO
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3

Poetry and Music is a lot more lax on contractions

Poetry, song lyrics, etc. often uses contractions to maintain rhyme and meter, even when the contraction would normally sound wrong to native speakers. You's is certainly not a contraction that I would recommend in day to day speech, but all those fancy contractions you hear Shakespeare using like shan’t, ‘twere, 'twon’t, 'tis, ha'n’t were not about being grammatically correct, but to force sentences to fit iambic pentameter. In poetry, contractions are not just words, but pronunciation keys to show the reader when to slur words together to keep the whole piece sounding correct.

So, considering the medium you are writing in, I'd say it's absolutely acceptable. But in most cases of formal, or even causal writing, this particular contraction would not read well since it's not a common part of any written vernacular dialect.

Nosajimiki
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