1324: The Oddity of "Aren't I?" Jul 27, 2018

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In general, people tend to be pretty good at following rules of grammar, with the exception of phrases. There are a variety of ways that English speakers opt for conventions over rules [1], but with such little morphology, there aren’t so many occasions to use incorrect verb-forms anyway. However, in the utterance “Aren’t I…?” the verb clearly does not agree with the subject; this is not the case for the statement “I am (not)”, or the affirmative question “Am I?”. This really is because people are quite used to contractions in this type of situation, but for some reason “amn’t” did not catch on outside of a few regional dialects, and moreover the typical contraction “I’m” is in the wrong order for here. It is thought that one of the many causes for “ain’t”—as there was more than one factor—was the elision of the older “amn’t”.
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