There are some cases in English where contractions can't be used. For example, "that's not the kind of person he's." "He is" cannot be contracted into "he's" in this case.
I want to know the rules behind it… but the only information I've found on the Internet so far is "don't use contractions in formal writing" which is far from what I'm asking.
Posted Apr 25, 2012, 8:45 PM UTC
The NP-Host Constraint: Auxiliaries may only cliticize onto an NP.
-Kaisse (1983)
That explains why these are bad:
* Not [even in New York]'s John considered easy.
* Not [for a minute]'s he been happy here.
* [That John finally ate]'s making momma happy.
* [That we eat a lot]'s been making her miserable.
If at any point in the syntax, a constituent immediately following be is deleted, then ... be cannot undergo contraction.
-Lakoff (1970)
Wh-movement
* I wonder where the party's [e] tonight.
* I wonder where John's [e].
* I wonder who that man's [e].
Null VP
* You're leaving and he's [e] too.
* Either John's left or Bill's [e].
Comparative Subdeletion
* There are more researchers than they're [e] teachers.
* The table's longer than it's [e] wide.
Heavy NP Shift
* John's [e] to Mary the best friend in the world.
* Mary's [e] after Jane the best athlete on the team.
Distributed Nominalization
* The decision's [e] to go ahead with it.
* Mary's picture's [e] of John in Shirley in Mahopac.
-Examples from Kaisse.
* John's, I think, eaten dinner already.
* John's, Bill said, an excellent writer.
* John's, to my knowledge, a good doctor.
This is just the bit I felt like writing up. But really read Kaisse (1983). Linguists often call this "AR" short for "Auxiliary Reduction," by the way.
Extremely briefly(and possibly wrong, for all I know!): Stress. When it's stressed, you can't contract. If stress is hard to grasp for you, try leaving the part that you want to contract completely and see if it still makes some sense.
Observe:
That not the kind of person he is. (slight "hurr, Tarzan" vibe, but understandable)
That's not the kind of person he (what?).
When I had compositions in high school, my teacher had one rule: do not write contractions. Use apostrophes only for possessives and in quotes to write down verbatim what somebody said. This was simple to follow, and made for nicely formal writing. I was never confused by "it's" and "its" as a result!
I want to know the rules behind it… but the only information I've found on the Internet so far is "don't use contractions in formal writing" which is far from what I'm asking.
I guess I forgot the teacher's second rule: always read the next paragraph.
I suspect this is a fairly complex linguistics question (an interesting one too). You should definitely ask r/linguistics. There's a paper on JSTOR called "On Blocking the Rules for Contraction in English" that looks like it might be germane.