there’dn’t’ve

Summary by Krater

Tom Scott explains why certain contractions like "it's" or "there'dn't've" are ungrammatical in English due to syntactic gaps and stress patterns.

From the video

Answers: Why are certain English contractions ungrammatical?

• linguistics
• clitics
• grammar of contractions
• syntactic gaps
• stress patterns in speech

What it concludes

• Clitics cannot exist on their own and attach to phrases rather than individual words.
• Contractions fail to work due to syntactic gaps where a clitic implies another word should follow.
• Clitics cannot be stressed, which prevents certain reductions like "yes, it's" or "it'sn't" from being grammatical.
• Repeated enough times over time, clitics can become grammaticalized and written as standard forms.