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The double copula, also known as the reduplicative copula, double is or Isis,[1][2] is the usage of two successive copulae when only one is necessary, largely in spoken English. For example:
My point is, is that...
This construction is accepted by many English speakers in everyday speech, though some listeners interpret it as stumbling or hesitation,[3] and others as a "really annoying language blunder".[4]
Some prescriptive guides[5] do not accept this usage,[clarification needed] but do accept a circumstance where "is" appears twice in sequence when the subject happens to end with a copula; for example:
What my point is is that...
In the latter sentence, "What my point is" is a dependent clause, and functions as the subject; the second "is" is the main verb of the sentence. In the former sentence, "My point" is a complete subject, and requires only one "is" as the main verb of the sentence. Another example of grammatically valid use of "is is" is "All it is is a ..."[citation needed]
Some sources describe the usage after a dependent clause (the second example) as "non-standard" rather than generally correct.[6][7]
^Brenier, Jason; Coppock, Liz; Michaelis, Laura; Staum, Laura (2006), "ISIS: It's not a disfluency, but how do we know that?", Berkeley Linguistics Society 32nd Annual Meeting(PDF), archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-05-03, retrieved 2012-10-18
^
Brenier, Jason M. and Laura A. Michaelis. 2005. Optimization via Syntactic Amalgam: Syntax-Prosody Mismatch and Copula Doubling. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1: 45-88.
^"Grammar Pet Peeves: Huffington Post Readers Pick 7 Really Annoying Language Blunders", The Huffington Post 11/04/2010
^Ltd, Blair Arts. "The ODLT - the Online Dictionary of Language Terminology". www.odlt.org. Retrieved 2019-04-29.
^Fischer, Jordan (September 24, 2013). "The double is". The Noblesville Current. Archived from the original on March 5, 2016. Retrieved April 29, 2019.
^Pelish, Alyssa (2013-09-17). "Are You a Double-Is-er?". Slate Magazine. Retrieved 2019-04-29.
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