Re: OT: contractions

Andreas Johansson wrote:
> But miskeyings does not normally create outright grammatical errors.
Well, it might be interpreted as an error in changing a phrasing.  E.g.,
"they're, usually." might be interpreted as having originally been
"They're, usually, ..." something else which was subsequently deleted,
and the "they're" was overlooked.

> You probably has point here. According to the OECD statistics I've seen,
> Americans after twelve years of schooling have among the worst commands of the
> written form of their mother language among developed countries.
Except that the ban on forms like "they're, usually" is part of the
spoken language (the formal written language doesn't allow contractions
at all).  So far as I know, every dialect has that.  Even dialects that
allow zero copula use the same rules for deletion of the copula that
Standard English uses for contraction.

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