English Auxiliary Contraction as a Two-Stage Process: Evidence from Corpus Data

English auxiliary contraction has a rich history in the linguistic literature, with analyses spanning four decades’ worth of work (e.g. Zwicky, 1970, Bresnan, 1978, Kaisse, 1983, Inkelas & Zec, 1993, Anderson, 2008). However, with the exception of work in the sociolinguistic domain (e.g. Labov, 1969, McElhinny, 1993, Walker & Meechan, 1999), work on contraction has relied exclusively on authors’ intuitions, with no examination of the patterns observed in natural speech. As a result, descriptions of this phenomenon have failed to take into account the factors that condition its variation, which may have implications for where in the grammar it is situated. The sociolinguistic work on contraction, by contrast, is founded on empirical data, but is incomplete for another reason: the low frequency of some auxiliaries in natural speech has led many researchers to focus exclusively on contraction of the copula, overlooking any questions about unity of process that are raised by the contraction of other auxiliaries. For a number of reasons, the time is now right to address these concerns by revisiting this variable. For one, the advent of massive speech corpora has facilitated the study of low-frequency morphosyntactic phenomena. Additionally, a detailed study of contraction can contribute to recent discussions concerning the place of variation within the grammar (see Adger, 2006:506 for a list of relevant work), by adding to our knowledge of which linguistic elements can vary and which elements can condition that variation. To that end, this paper describes the results of a corpus study of English auxiliary contraction and their implications for the place of variation in a grammatical architecture. Specifically, I argue that the quantitative patterns displayed by this variable lend themselves to a two-stage analysis of contraction, as an allomorphic alternation followed by the application of low-level phonetic or phonological processes. I support this analysis with data showing an effect of subject length on contracted forms, a finding which raises important questions about the grammatical locus of such a conditioning factor. This study thus underscores the importance of quantitative data in theoretical analysis. The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 describes the phenomenon of auxiliary contraction and surveys previous literature on this alternation. Section 3 describes the methodology of the corpus study. Section 4 presents the pattern of variation found in the corpus data and proposes the two-stage analysis to account for it. Section 5 provides support for this two-stage analysis with a study of the effect of subject length on contraction rate, and discusses the implications of the observed subject length effect for a grammatical architecture. Section 6 concludes.