Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-15T05:48:49.615Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Given two be’s, how do they Agree?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2016

Diane Massam
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
Erin Grant
Affiliation:
University of Toronto

Extract

This squib contributes to the literature on intrusive-be constructions in English, examples of which appear in (1). Notably, there are two main sub-types, commonly referred to as double-be (la) and single-be (lb) constructions, which together have been termed intrusive-be constructions (Massam 2013). In this squib, we focus on double-be constructions, in which two instances of be (bel and be2) appear adjacent to each other as in (la), and we examine the tense and agreement forms that be can take in such constructions.

Type
Squib/Notule
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association. 2015

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Andersen, Gisle. 2002. Corpora and the double copula. In From the COLT's mouth… and others: Language corpora studies: In honour of Anna-Brita Stenstrom, ed. Breivik, Leiv Egil and Hasselgren, Angela, 4358. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Bolinger, Dwight. L. 1987. The remarkable double IS. English Today 9:3958.Google Scholar
Brenier, Jason and Michaelis, Laura. 2005. Optimization via syntactic amalgam: Syntax-prosody mismatch and copula doubling. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1:4588.Google Scholar
Calude, Andreea. 2008. Demonstrative clefts and double cleft constructions in spontaneous spoken English. Studia Linguistica 62:78118.Google Scholar
Cochrane, James. 2004. Between you and I: A little book of bad English. Naaperville, IL: Sourcebooks.Google Scholar
Coppock, Elizabeth and Staum, Laura. 2004. Origin of the English double-is construction. Ms., Stanford University.Google Scholar
Coppock, Elizabeth, Brenier, Jason, Staum, Laura, and Michaelis, Laura. 2006. ISIS: It's not a disfluency, but how do we know that? Paper presented at the 32nd Berkeley Linguistics Society Annual Conference, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Curzan, Anne. 2012. Revisiting the reduplicative copula with corpus-based evidence. In Oxford handbook of the History of English, ed. Nevalainen, Terttu and Traugott, Elizabeth Closs, 211221. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Davies, Mark. 2008. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 400+ million words, 1990-present. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.Google Scholar
den Dikken, Marcel. 2006. Relators and linkers: The syntax of predication, predicate inversion, and copulas. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Dickerman, Stacy M. 2009. The thing is is it's a focus particle: A new analysis of the Thing-is constructions in English. Ms., New York University.Google Scholar
Heycock, Caroline. 2012. Specification, equation, and agreement in copular sentences. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 57:209240.Google Scholar
Higgins, Roger. 1979. The pseudo-cleft construction in English. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Jehn, Richard Douglas. 1979. That's something that I wouldn't want to account for, is a sentence like this. Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics 5:5162.Google Scholar
Koontz-Garboden, Andrew. 2001. LFG problem set: FOCUS and TENSE in the thing is construction. Ms., Stanford University.Google Scholar
Lambrecht, Knud. 1988. There was a farmer had a dog: Syntactic amalgams revisited. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, ed. Axmaker, Shelley, Jaisser, Annie, and Singmaster, Helen, 319339. Berkeley Linguistics Society, University of California, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Massam, Diane. 1999. Thing-is constructions: The thing is, is what's the right analysis? English Language and Linguistics 3:335352.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Massam, Diane. 2013. Intrusive be constructions in (spoken) English: Apposition and beyond. Proceedings of the 2012 meeting of the Canadian Linguistics Association. Available at: homes.chass.utoronto.ca/∼cla-acl/actes2013/Massam-2013.pdf.Google Scholar
Massam, Diane. 2014. The syntax of extra be constructions in English. Ms., University of Toronto.Google Scholar
Mikkelson, Line. 2005. Copular clauses: Specification, predication, and equation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McConvell, Patrick. 1988. To be or double be? Current changes in the English copula. Australian Journal of Linguistics 8:287305.Google Scholar
McConvell, Patrick. 2004. Catastrophic change in current English: Emergent double be's and free-be's. Talk presented at the Australian National University. Available at: languagelog.Idc.upenn.edu/myl/ldc/anubbppt3.pdf.Google Scholar
McConvell, Patrick and Zwicky, Arnold. 2006. Isis bibliography. Ms., Stanford University.Google Scholar
O'Neill, Teresa. 2013. Coordinations in English copular amalgams. Ms., City University of New York.Google Scholar
Ross-Hagebaum, Sebastien. 2004. The That's X is Y construction as an information-structure amalgam. In Proceedings of the Thirtieth Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, ed. Chang, Charles, Houser, Michael J., Kim, Yuni, Mortensen, David, Park-Doob, Mischa, and Toosarvandani, Maziar, 403414. Berkeley Linguistics Society, University of California, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Shapiro, Michael. 1993. Presidential address to the Semiotic Society of America: The boundary question. American Journal of Semiotics 190:526.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shapiro, Michael and Haley, Michael C.. 2002. The reduplicative copula is is. American Speech 77:305308.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sihler, Andrew L. 2000. Language history: An introduction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Simpson, Rita C., Briggs, Sarah L., Ovens, Janine, and Swales, John M.. 2002. The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English [MICASE]. Ann Arbor, Ml: Regents of the University of Michigan.Google Scholar
Tuggy, David. 1996. The thing is is that people talk that way. In Cognitive linguistics in the redwoods: The expansion of a new paradigm in linguistics, ed. Casad, Eugene, 713752. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zwicky, Arnold. 2003. Isis commemorates Memorial Day weekend. Ms., Stanford University.Google Scholar
Zwicky, Arnold. 2007. Extris Extris. Handout from Stanford SemFest, Stanford University. March 2007. Available at: www.stanford.edu/∼zwicky/SemFest07.out.pdf.Google Scholar