grammar - Is this contraction of 'there is' acceptable to native speakers of English?


In the Slate article, The Curse of “You May Also Like”, the following sentence has a contraction of there is that doesn't sit well with my ear for American or British English. I wonder whether any of our native English-speaking users find it acceptable and grammatical. I think it's not idiomatic, is ungrammatical, and is unacceptable, but I may just be too old and ornery to cozy down to this level of change in language usage. NB: I first coined the phrase cozy down to and then found an apt example of cozy down on the Internet.



Amazon's knowledge, however, goes deeper than Netflix's: Since it also runs a site where we buy books, it knows everything that there's to know about our buying behavior and the prices that we are willing to pay.



Is this acceptable?



Answer



As usual, this sentence has been tampered with. Extensively.


Stripping it to the bone, here's a much simpler sentence with the same rub:



  • *A knows everything that there's to know about Y.


And it is ungrammatical. But it's hard to see why. That's because the object of know is



  • everything that there's to know about Y.


which means



  • 'there is/are things that one needs to know about Y, and we're talking about all of these things'


or, before There-insertion,



  • 'things that one needs to know about Y exist, and we're talking about all of these things'


That is, dummy there can only occur as a Subject in an existential or locative clause.
If dummy there is followed by a noun phrase, then there is can be contracted to there's.



  • There is food on the table. ~ There's food on the table.


But if "movement rules" like embedded question formation remove the NP following there is, it can't be contracted to there's.



  • You can have what there is. ~ *You can have what there's.


since the purpose of contracting a predictable dummy like there is is to save syllables at the beginning of the sentence, so as to get to the important information faster. At the end of a sentence, however, such a contraction has no purpose and therefore doesn't occur.


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