Sentence-final contractions [duplicate]

Question

There are some pieces of inflection like the genitive marker that can attach to phrases (cf. [The man in the hall]’s taste in wallpaper is appalling) and so they sometimes behave like a contraction. They can also be sentence-final:

(1) Chomsky's book was boring and so was Lasnik's

So I was wondering whether you could have a more or less natural sentence-final contracted auxiliary (widely believed to be impossible). Specifically, I want to know if (2) or (3) are natural-sounding when they express something like (4). (I indicate strong stress with capitalization.)

(2) It's not CHOMSKY that's leaving but LASNIK'S

(3) It's not CHOMSKY who's leaving but LASNIK'S

(4) Rather than CHOMSKY leaving, LASNIK is leaving

Answer 1

Ah, the infamous apostrophe S. Yes, you'll see it in some contractions, but it's also used to show possession, for example, "Those aren't my dirty dishes, they're Tom's." (If this were a contraction, that would mean it's short for "Tom is.")

When you speak of Lasnik's book being boring, that's the possessive, not a contraction. (The book that Lasnik wrote, or as it's expressed in some languages, the book of Lasnik.)

Your other sentences do involve a contraction. If we allow repetition, #3 would be "It's not Chomsky who's leaving, [but rather] it's Lasnik who's leaving." (Note that "who" is preferred over "that," because Lasnik is a person.)

With the type of sentence you are working on, we need a parallel construction. It's [not] Chomsky => it's Lasnik.

All that leads us to the following corrections to your proposed sentences 2 through 4:

(2) It's not Chomsky that's leaving, but Lasnik.

(3) It's not Chomsky who's leaving, but Lasnik.

(4) Rather than Chomsky leaving, Lasnik is.

Note that in #4, we need the "is," because there is no other instance of that word in the sentence.

Your #1 is fine.