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

Solution 1:

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.

Solution 2:

It's perfectly grammatical; but it falls badly on the ear.

As mplungjan observes, the phrase is knows everything there is to know, which has a fixed rhythm: a half line of common meter, ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ . This version preserves the meter, but it intrudes a that which throws the stress on there.

But in natural speech, the construction there is is almost always unstressed when dummy there is in play. In that case, contraction is natural.

There's no place like home.

When the construction needs to be stressed, to assert the existence of something, it is uncontracted and the stress falls on is. Consequently, there is stressed only when it is the locative adverb:

There's what I was looking for!

This is a clumsy effort to look colloquial by a tin-eared writer with a typical corporate fondness for superfluous thats.

Solution 3:

Egads – what's the written world coming to?

Indeed, your excerpt made me wince on first read, but I wanted to investigate further before I passed judgement, so I did the quasi-obligatory Ngram:

Interestingly enough, that red line isn't flat along the bottom; there are scatterings of instances in the literature. However, when I checked those, the great preponderance of them were coincidental, bridging across the period between two sentences (see screen shot at the bottom of my answer, or click here to see even more).

I did find manage to find one example that uses the contraction similar to your quote:

however, in that instance, the author is quoting an interviewee, so even that example only shows that “everything there's” might occur in conversation – but that wouldn't necessarily make it acceptable news copy.

Speaking of news, when I was mulling this over, I did remember that famous New York Times tagline:

It's funny how it seems okay to contract that is, or it is, in such contexts, whereas contracting there is sounds more “off.” Perhaps it wouldn't be that way, if ’twas just used more?

Solution 4:

It's bad. I've seen the badness attributed to the gap following the contracted form -- "... there's [gap] to know", where the gap is created by the relative pronoun that is removed from this place. Naturally, that came from the MIT direction, since it doesn't make sense. My theory about this (and probably other people's) is that the problem is losing a stressed vowel due to contraction. We start with "... there is something ] to know", where stress comes at the end of the constituent indicated by the right bracket in my schematic representation. If it weren't in a relative construction, that would put stress on "something", and the preceding "is" would not be stressed, so that we could contract the "is" and wind up with " ... there's 1something ] to know". No problem.

However, the "something" is relativized and lost, leaving " ... there 1is ] to know, and now the "is" is stressed, since it has come to be at the end of a constituent. That prevents the vowel being lost, so you can't contract.

I think this is a pleasing theory, since stress on a vowel preventing its deletion seems to me to be a natural constraint on contraction.

Unfortunately, I recall from when I was working on this, there are other examples which seem to favor the gap theory I mentioned above. I can't recall crucial examples right now, but maybe you can think of some.

Also, in some other cases it looks like you can contract a stressed vowel, and the stress on the vowel just gets moved onto a contiguous surviving syllable. "No, I cannot go" -> "No, I can't go".