there’dn’t’ve

Is this introduction weird? Yes, it's. 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 there'dn't've been any problems with that. Ah. Well, how do we understand where the problem's with this? I was supposed to've'd a brilliant idea here, but it appears... it'sn't. Okay, let's expand those back out. That took me about seventeen takes to get right. Why don't those contractions work? 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. But what's the "'s"? You can't even really say it on its own. 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 "enklitikos", 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. Or you can say that something is "dog-ish". Those all attach to the word "dog". If you add some detail, you say "my beautiful, green, astro-dog", not "my astro-beautiful, green, dog". That doesn't work. For a clitic, it's different. "My astro-dog's been learning tricks. " There's the clitic, just after "dog". 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; the ‘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'sn'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? "... who 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: stress patterns. Part of the reason these forms can be reduced so much is because they're generally unstressed, or weak. They're pronounced quieter and less distinctly. You cannot stress a clitic, and it sounds weird when you try. So let's 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", that's called ‘rejoiner emphasis', but they can't say "iMMM going to do it". Doesn't work. So if the verb would contextually be in its weak form, unstressed, and it also starts with /w/, /h/, 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'd'n't've'" could work. After all, "shouldn't've" is grammatical in spoken English, as in "I shouldn't've done that. " Actually, in my dialect, if I'm talking quickly, I pronounce that as either /ʃədənə/ or even just /ʃədn/. Like, "/ʃədn/ 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. After all, we used to say "'tis" not "it's", so who knows: in a century or two, maybe "there'd'n'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.