“Are you cold?”
“I’m”
“Have you showered?”
“I’ve”
“Is it raining?”
“It’s”
“Am I ugly?”
“You’re”
You get the gist. Why is it so weird to say these instead of “I am, I have, It is, You are”?
In: 614
Linguist here.
It’s phonological stress.
Where the stress is one of the things that distinguishes a vinyl *record* from to *record* a video.
Unstressed syllables have a tendency to be reduced or elided altogether, like *prob’ly* for *probably*. Even when you say all of the syllables in *probably*, the second syllable is unstressed and is a reduced uh sound instead of the more distinct sound a short a normally makes.
In “It is me”, *is* is not normally stressed (except for added emphasis) so it can contract. It “It ís” as an answer to “what’s making that noise?”, *is* is stressed so it cannot contract.
Predicates (basically the part of a sentence that is not the subject, the verbs+ any objects or or any predicate nouns/adjectives) have to have one heavy phrasal stress in English. In phrases like “It is” there is no following word to take the stress so it has to fall on is. In “It is making the noise”, the heaviest stress falls on *máking* so is can be unstressed, reduced or contracted.
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