Korean Job Discussion Forums

[cubanlord]

How would you go about explaining why sentence 1 and 2 are ok and sentence 3 is not ok?

Sentence 1 - Jack isn't happy, but I'm happy.
Sentence 2 - Mary isn't happy, but I am.
Sentence 3 - Frank isn't happy, but I'm.

[pdxsteve]

[Smee]

I'll wait for a true grammarian to weigh in, but it looks to me like it has something to do with the subjects in the clauses.
Also, I think parallelism (sp?) comes into play: that is, what happens on one side of the conjunction (but) must happen on the other.

Look at the sentence "Frank isn't happy, but I'm." The first clause has an adjective, but the second one doesn't. Therefore you shouldn't make a contraction. (Likewise, in the first clause it isn't the subject "Frank" that's contracted, it's the verb.)

But what about "Frank's not happy, but I'm"? I think here you can talk about parallelism. There's no adjective in the second clause, so it's awkward.

But "Frank's not happy, but I'm great" is okay. It's because there's an adjective in both the first and the second clauses.

That's my take, but I wonder what others think about it.

[ChuckECheese]

[SpedEd]

The contraction, "I'm," always precedes the predicate. "I am" can answer the question, "What are you going to do?". Technically, "I'm" can as well, but grammar gurus never use the contraction at the end of a sentence like #3.

[cubanlord]

Thanks everyone. I have the answer. I appreciate your responses.

[Fredbob]

Hey OP, what is the answer?
I think I know it but I can't articulate it.

[cubanlord]

[Woland]

[cubanlord]

.... Yes. I did quote from the wrong spot. See, there are 3 different questions that address the same argument. Here is the one I meant to list:

A. I�m not aware of any rule that states a contraction is required in the context of short answers.

There are several acceptable ways to answer the question, �Are you hungry?� in the affirmative.

1. Yes.
2. Yes, I am.
3. Yes, I�m hungry.
4. Yes, I am hungry.

All four of these answers are grammatical. Number 4 is formal. Most likely it would not be a frequent respose unless the speaker is emphatic.

Note that the following response is not grammatical. You can't use this contraction on its own because the verb "am" is stressed (since the adjective "hungry" is omitted).

Are you hungry? *Yes, I�m.

I remember a song in the movie Yankee Doodle Dandy, where the stage performers sang the lyrics, "I'm just biding my time because that's the kind of guy I'm." The contraction is needed for the rhyme, but it's ungrammatical.

Lowell


Also this one:

Q. (from Mary) In this sentence that expresses opposite ideas, which part is stressed? I base my question on the rule: When giving an opposite idea, the part that is changed is stressed.

Fred isn't happy, but I'm happy.

A. You should put the stress on the subject pronoun "I." Your attitude is the opposite of Fred's. You can omit "happy" and use the full verb form.

Fred isn't happy, but I am.

By the way, excellent post up there.

[Woland]

I brought this up with a colleague this morning and it rang a bell on something he recently read, so he directed me to the folowing book:

Anderson, S. R., & Lightfoot, D. W. (2002). The language organ: Linguistics as cognitive physiology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

On pages 25 to 29 of the book this exact problem is discussed, with the final resolution being the following constraint:

Every syntactic phrase which corresponds to any pronounced material must contain enough material to make up at least one phonological word. (p. 29)

This constraint is then grounded in certain universals of human language, if anybody wants to look further in the book.

Let me offer some explanation of the constraint for non-linguists:

The sentence, *Harry isn't happy, but I'm, is ungrammatical. The contracted element, -m, is the only member of its syntactic phrase (I won't draw out the phrase structure here; trust me on this). However, phonologically, this element is a clitic, a phonological unit which cannot stand on its own and must be attached to another word to be realized. In other words, it is not a phonological word. Since the constraint claims that any syntactic phrase must contain enough material for a complete phonological word and -m is the only member of its syntactic phrase, but is not enough to be a phonological word, the sentence containing it is ungrammatical.

This probably isn't much clearer, but it's the best I can do. In short, it's nothing about stress, though.

[khyber]

What about:
He can play soccer well, but I can't.

Is that also bad grammar then? Cause I swear that I say this kinda stuff ALL the time.

[ChuckECheese]

[Woland]

[gang ah jee]