Category talk:Contractions
Difference between contractions and inflections[change]
The n't ending that occurs with most auxiliary verbs isn't the same kind of thing that you find with auxiliary verbs that are themselves contracted.
- Contracted is, have, will, etc. can occur after words belonging to any of the classes:
- He's nice. pronoun
- Brett's an admin. noun
- The one I like'll be hard to get. verb
- The ones that went quickly're popular. adverb
- etc.
- Although they may look odd in writing, they are very common in speech.
- In contrast, n't can only attach to auxiliary verbs, and not even all of them (e.g., amn't is not found in standard English.) This is analogous to other suffixes such as the past participle -ed ending which works only for a certain set of verbs.
- Contractions never change the meaning of the sentence, but the n't inflection can:
- You can not go to school and still learn. Allows for the possibility of learning either in or out of school.
- You can't go to school and still learn. Disallows the possibility of learning in school.
- Contractions do not have any effect on the spelling or pronunciation of the preceding word, but the n't inflection causes changes in some situations (e.g., won't & shan't).
Because of this, I would suggest that we list the modal auxiliary n't forms as "negatives" and save "contractions" for things like 'll, 're, etc. --Brett 15:33, 7 December 2007 (UTC)