Have to vs. have got to in British and Irish English(es)

Abstract

The usages of have to and have got to differ between major varieties such as British and American English, but little attempt has so far been made to study variation between these two forms in other varieties. The aim of this chapter is to investigate this variation by comparing standard and nonstandard varieties of British English (BrE) and those representing another “national variety” spoken in the British Isles, viz. Irish English (IrE). My database comprises, first, the spoken components of two International Corpus of English (ICE) corpora, viz. ICE-Great Britain (ICE-GB) and ICE-Ireland (ICE-IRL). Secondly, the nonstandard varieties of BrE and IrE are examined on the basis of corpora collected from traditional vernacular English English (EngE) and both southern and northern IrE dialects. The quantitative study of deontic have got to vs. have to shows that their distribution is significantly different in BrE and IrE: in spoken BrE, have got to is proportionately clearly more frequent than in IrE, in which have to is by far the preferred variant. On the other hand, the near absence of have got to in both educated and especially vernacular spoken IrE strongly suggests that have got to never really made its way into IrE. An examination of 19th-century IrE texts and two other “contact Englishes”, viz. Hebridean English and Indian English, reveals a similar difference, which may be explained as “colonial lag”.