Have Got, a Pattern Preserver

Abstract

T HE 'HAVE GOT' WHICH SUBSTITUTES FOR have has for the past four centuries been performing a valuable function in the English language. It, therefore, should be cleared of the charges of being 'redundant' or 'illogical,' which are frequently made by its critics.1 The use of have got for have in sentences like 'I have got two hands' is evidently a resolution of a conflict between two factors in English: stress and syntax. This theory for the rise of have got is proposed: have got was substituted for have to strengthen the subject + verb construction in the place where, through reduction of stress on have, that construction was not clearly signaled. That place was in utterances like 'I've two hands'; that is, where have occurred in its simple-present form as a 'full' verb but was reduced in stress. Have got for have is first documented clearly in the late sixteenth century: the Oxford English Dictionary under get cites passages from Shakespeare; Jespersen gives quotations from Marlowe and Dekker;2 Rice has slightly earlier but equivocal citations from Sir Thomas More and Latimer.3 The very lack of earlier instances refutes another theory for the rise of the substitution. The substance of that theory, which was presented at least a century ago, in Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms, and is still popular, is that, because have was frequently used as an auxiliary, people felt a need for another word to express or emphasize the idea of 'possess.' That theory simply ignores history: have had been used for many centuries both as an auxiliary and as a full verb meaning 'possess' before the substitution arose. No, it was not the use of have as an auxiliary that brought forth have got. The substitution arose from a change in stress patterns in early Modern English. According to Wyld, 'at least as early as the middle of the fifteenth century vowels in unstressed syllables were shortened, reduced, or confused, very much as in Colloquial English at the present time.'4 For example, the word honorable had primary stress, as today, on the first syllable, but the other vowels were not reduced to schwa until, say, the fifteenth century. Furthermore, by the sixteenth century, there was not only reduction of vowels to schwa within words, but sometimes loss of schwa. For example,