Today’s Bizarro, with a pun on contractions:
The linguistic contractions in question are instances of what’s become known in the trade as Auxiliary Reduction — reduced versions of (certain) auxiliary verbs, which then form a unit with the immediately preceding word. In the examples in the cartoon, the auxiliaries that are reduced are is (or, less likely but still in principle possible, has) and are, and the preceding word in each case is a personal pronoun subject (it, she, we). The resulting elements act in some ways like two-word sequences and in other ways like single words, so they present interesting analytic puzzles.
