Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2010

I'm not sure what you mean by "standard".  We don't have standards in
conversational English.  We see/hear glaring errors in conversational
English, but this is more a matter of individual convention.   Some
people would say "All of it is not theme parks..." and some people
would say "All of it's not theme parks".  A listener who would object
to the contraction used this way in formal writing would not find it
inappropriate in conversational English.

You are reading a novel, and a novel that contains conversational
passages.  Morrison might not use the contraction in a descriptive
passage, but might feel that the use is perfectly ordinary in
conversational English.  It's not an African-American dialectal thing.

Think of "The worst of it's over." "Most of it's gone." "Half of it's
still there."

It's almost as if we put hyphens to construct a noun phrase:
worst-of-it. Most-of-it. Half-of-it.

Perfectly.  "Is" can be contracted in just about any context where it's
not emphasized--and usually is.  The only place that comes to mind where
it's rare to contract it is in a verb compound--and even then it's not
so rare in speech.  "If it occurs in a compound and's not emphasized"
would probably never be written, but is unremarkable in speech.  After
the first of a pair of coordinating conjunctions would probably be a
little weird, though:  "if it either's emphasized or occurs in a
compound."  And of course it's less commonly contracted following
another "s" or "z" sound.

What's not entirely standard is modifying a verb whose subject is "all"
with "not."  Careful speakers usually resolve the ambiguity by saying
either "not all" or "none" instead.

¬R