Name: there’dn’t’ve
Uploaded: 2025-05-23T07:39:25.000Z
Duration: 4 min 35 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

If it's is just a contraction of it and is, then why doesn't that work?

In fact, why didn't English just do a find and replace on all the contractions?

I'm sure that'dn't've been any problems with that.

Well, how do we understand where the problem's with this?

I was supposed to've had a brilliant idea here, but it appears it isn't.

Okay, let's expand those back out, that took me about 17 takes to get right.

Let's talk about it's in that introductory line.

It is just a pronoun, doing its job, referring to something that's established earlier or obvious from context.

It's just kind of leaning on the it for substance.

Which is why the technical term for it is clitic, from the ancient Greek and cliticus, meaning to lean on.

A clitic is a part of speech that can't exist just on its own.

Now, we've talked about things like this before, prefixes, suffixes, and other affixes, things that attach to words like able or un.

But a clitic isn't one of those, and we know that because it doesn't attach to individual words.

It attaches to a phrase, a bigger part of speech.

So, using a prefix or affix, you can go from a dog to a proto dog, or an anti dog, or an astro dog.

If you add some detail, you say, my beautiful, green astro dog, not my astro beautiful, green dog, that doesn't work.

Let's add some more detail, my astro dog from Jupiter's been learning tricks.

That movement of s within the sentence means it can't be an affix.

That's behaves like it's the whole word, like it's has, not is, has.

All that means that s has to be in its own category, it's a clitic.

But that doesn't explain why it doesn't work sometimes.

If it was always possible to contract is and has down like that, there might be an argument that it's just a pronunciation thing.

There has to be some additional reason that means it isn't and yes, it's are ungrammatical.

Now, if you want the full answer to that, you can read Anderson's aspects of the theory of clitics, but a quick warning, it is 287 pages long.

Not including the references and indices.

So to summarize as best as I can for English, there are two reasons.

The first is what's called a syntactic gap.

Which means the presence of the clitic strongly implies that another word should follow.

I think Anderson's best example is, who do you think you're, oh, do you think you're what?

Meeting, talking to, it feels like there should be another word in that syntactic gap.

The clitic is stranded at the end, and flipping that around, if you say, who do you think you are meeting?

The sentence feels not ungrammatical, but maybe a little awkward and robotic.

And very much tied to that is the second reason.

Part of the reason these forms can be reduced so much is because they're generally unstressed or weak, they're pronounced more quietly and less distinctly.

You cannot stress a clitic and it sounds weird when you try.

If a child's parent is pestering them because they haven't cleaned up, the kid can reply, I am going to do it.

So if the verb would contextually be in its weak form, unstressed, and it also starts with or a vowel, it can get even more reduced to this clitic form.

So we get we'll, they've, you'd, I'm, and so on, repeat enough times, they become grammaticalized, and they start to get written like that as well.

In theory, something like there'dn't've could work.

After all, shouldn't have is grammatical and spoken English, as in, I shouldn't have done that.

Actually, in my dialect, if I'm talking quickly, I pronounce that as either shouldna, or even just shouldn't, like shouldn't done that.

Languages change and evolve over time, words become clitics, can stay that way for a while, and then eventually they may start to sound ungrammatical to future generations.

So who knows, in a century or two, maybe there'dn't've will be perfectly unremarkable English.

If you want more detail about this, there's a whole episode on my co-author Gretchen McCulloch's podcast, Lingthusiasm.

The link is on screen or in the description.