Abstract
This paper concerns itself with dialectal differences between British Eng-lish (BrE) and American English (AmE) regarding modal have-got and its scope with respect to sentential negation. Modal haven’t got is perfectly acceptable in BrE, meaning ‘not obligated to’ in the standard variety. In AmE, modal have-got is somewhat degraded when the have has unambiguously raised, and especially so when it is negated, as shown in a preliminary acceptability judgement survey of American English speakers. An analysis in terms of polarity sensitivity is inadequate, and Iatridou & Zeijlstra’s (2013) syntax for modals is overly restrictive in the face of scopally ambiguous have not (got) to in non-standard varieties of BrE. We propose an analysis in terms of the locus of modality: whereas have and got are separate in BrE, in AmE have-got is a scopally indivisible whole. Finally, we evaluate how well this analysis extends to an additional dialectal difference in verb phrase ellipsis (LeSourd 1976), where the have of have-got survives ellipsis in BrE but not AmE.
Highlights
This paper concerns itself with two dialectal differences between British English (BrE) and American (AmE) English regarding have-got
In sum: negated modal have-got is unacceptable to many AmE speakers, but is acceptable to all BrE speakers, a dialectal difference that has not been noticed in previous literature
While modal have-got is perfectly acceptable in BrE, preliminary survey results showed that in AmE it is degraded when have unambiguously raises to T or C, and especially so when it is negated
Summary
This paper concerns itself with two dialectal differences between British English (BrE) and American (AmE) English regarding have-got. The second dialectal difference concerns verb phrase ellipsis (VPE) (3) It has been known since the 1970s (LeSourd 1976, Wasow & Akmajian 1977, Fodor & Smith 1978) that the have of both possessive and modal have-got survives VPE in BrE (a), but undergoes VPE in AmE (b). This section introduces deontic necessity modals in English and establishes the dialectal difference between standard BrE and AmE for the modal scope of have-got with respect to sentential negation. Have to scopes below negation: (6) means that Mary is not obligated to leave – i.e., she can stay.
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