The double-IS construction involves two instances of the verb is occurring together, as in sentence (1):

1) The funny thing is is that Lisa was there too.

It occurs most commonly after noun phrases such as the problem, the reason, the issue, and the thing. It may also occur with noun phrases like what’s nice, as shown in (2):

2) What’s nice is is that it has a sort of other-worldly character.

Is and its other forms (such as was, be, and am) are also known as copulas; therefore, the double-IS construction is also called the reduplicative copula or double copula construction. Still other names include IS IS, Extris, or the thing is construction.

Who says this?

Double-IS is well-attested in contemporary American English as well as in Australian and New Zealand English. Curzan’s (2012) analysis of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) suggests that this construction first appeared in the second half of the 20th century. There is no known evidence of geographic or sociological factors that might characterize its speaker distribution (McConvell 1988).

Syntactic Properties

Syntactic environment

In both of the example sentences above, double-IS precedes a clause that begins with that. Curzan (2012) also gives examples in which double-IS occurs before a clause not introduced by that as in (3a), before an infinitive phrase as in (3b), and before a noun phrase as in (3c):

3) a.*Well, the fact is is the money is there in the budget.

b.*The purpose of this is is to make sure that no one is taking anything inside...

c.*The problem always is is hypersensitivity.

Occurrence with the past tense

Double-IS appears in the past tense as well as the present. When the initial copula is in the past tense, is and was are both permitted in the second position, as illustrated in (4a) and (4b).

4)  a.*My feeling was, was that she doesn’t have a professional hold on the situation.
          (Coppock and Staum 2004)

 b.*The thing was, is that we had no control over the situation.
 (Massam 1999)

However, when the initial copula is in the present tense and the second is in the past tense, many speakers judge the sentence as unacceptable. For example, (5) is unacceptable to many speakers:

5) *The thing is, was that we had no control over the situation.
     (Coppock and Staum 2004)

Prosodic Properties

Prosody is a term that refers to the stress and intonation used when speaking a language. Double-IS seldom occurs in written English, but its prosodic profile supports the view that it is not a speech error because the first is must be spoken in a more prominent way than the second, which does not fit the typical pattern associated with mid-speech corrections (Coppock et al. 2006).

Coppock et al. (2006) show that speakers produce significantly fewer pauses between the first and second is in grammatical constructions like the assertion in(6a) than in examples of ungrammatical speech errors such as questions like (6b), predicative sentences like (6c), and constructions where the first is functions as an auxiliary as in (6d):

6) a.*The problem is (is) that you’re always late.

b. *The question is, is do we have enough time?

c. *John is is happy.

d. *The thing is, is going to fall apart.

The difference between (6a) and (6b-d) provides further evidence that the double-IS construction is not a speech error but rather a syntactic construction.

Related Phenomena

Wh-pseudoclefts

Double-IS has been extensively compared to the wh-pseudocleft construction, where there is a relative clause beginning with a wh-word in subject position, followed by the verb be. In this construction, it is unremarkable and grammatical to have two copulas in a row. Shapiro and Haley (2002) succinctly illustrate the formation of a pseudocleft, shown in sentence (7b), from the base sentence in (7a):

7)   a.*Dostoevsky witnessed a murder.

 b.*[What Dostoevsky witnessed] is a murder.

When the verb in the original sentence is a copula, as in (8a), forming the pseudocleft results in a sentence with two consecutive copulas, as in (8b):

8)   a. Dostoevsky is a murder witness.

 b. [What Dostoevsky is] is a murder witness.

In (8b) it is clear that the doubled copula results from the mechanism of pseudoclefting, parallel to constructions in which the main verb is not is.

The existence of doubled copulas in these environments leads Massam (1999) to propose that double-IS consists of a pseudocleft in which certain noun phrases (called “appositive” noun phrases) allow a wh-word to be optionally silent. This idea is illustrated by the pseudoclefting of sentence (9a), which first becomes a typically pseudoclefted sentence seen in (9b) and then undergoes optional deletion of the wh-word what to yield a double-IS construction in (9c):

9)   a.*The problem is that you’re always late.

b.*[ What the problem is] is that you’re always late.

c.*[ what the problem is] is that you’re always late.

Double-IS constructions are therefore considered in this analysis to be a kind of pseudocleft.

Focus constructions

Coppock and Staum (2004) argue against a “silent what” analysis on the grounds that it cannot explain the presence of is in sentences like (10), which they take to be of the same species as the double-IS construction:

10) That can’t be a very welcome outcome, is that rates will now rise.

Coppock and Staum (2004) argue that the second is has become a focus marker, which indicates that there is new or contrastive information being introduced to the conversation. They say that this analysis provides a ready explanation for the existence of other colloquial constructions in which unstressed IS occurs before a that clause as in (11):

11) Can I simply say this, is that the parliamentary process is a difficult one. (McConvell 1988)

Indeed, Curzan (2012) notes that the rise of the double-IS construction occurred along with a striking increase in the use of focus expressions in the 1960s and 1970s.

Page contributed by Phoebe Gaston on February 10, 2014

Updates/revisions: August 5, 2015 (Tom McCoy); June 8, 2018 (Katie Martin)

Please cite this page as: Gaston, Phoebe. 2014. Double is. Yale Grammatical Diversity Project: English in North America. (Available online at http://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/double-is. Accessed on YYYY-MM-DD). Updated by Tom McCoy (2015) and Katie Martin (2018).

References