An American English Usage Question From a Native Speaker of That Tongue

[kitewithfish]

Allow me, for the moment, to forgo to the traditional groveling about my failure to post- there is little excuse.

Rather, I have a question about standard American English usages of contractions with the verb "to have".

I'm going to provide a number of sentences that would sound weird to me, and then rewrite them to what sounds "normal" for American English usage as I understand it. Please tell me if I am full of shit and the original phrasing sounds perfectly normal American English to you.

CONFUSING: I haven't any money.

REWRITE: I didn't have any money.

***
CONFUSING: I haven't any money.

REWRITE: I don't have any money.


But things like, "I haven't had breakfast," where "haven't" serves as a "helping verb" sounds perfectly fine to me.

Am I out of my mind on this? Is this just a part of normal US English that I have totally not stumbled upon before? Or does this sound weird?

Comments

Hmm...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I think, though I'm not certain, that the two versions are caused by the word "have" possessing multiple meanings, and those are using different ones.

[oona]

>CONFUSING: I haven't any money.

>REWRITE: I didn't have any money.


Unless I'm mistaken, you mean CONFUSING: I hadn't any money.

I think your confusing parts are not normal for American use. In my experience, Brits and we Irish would use the so-called confusing way. My friend heard me say once, 'She needs shot.' He said, 'Don't you mean to say that she needs TO BE shot?' But at home we can do without the TO BE quite nicely. :-p

[kitewithfish]

Yes, that is what I meant. My brain refused to acknowledge the possibility of it, and attempted to correct it, all while I typed blithely on. Good catch.


Okay, good to have outside confirmation. I was reading some fic where there were a couple instances of this, so I had to assume it was a rule and not a one-time omission, but still. That's what I get for the blind assumption that everyone writing fic in English is American. Silly, silly American.


Now, I would interpret "She needs shot" as, "She needs A shot," as in, "Dear lord, find that woman some tequila, now!" That may be a personal issue....

[oona]

Hahahaha! Nuuu, it would be like, 'She needs slapped!' Also, if you are reading dialogue from across the pond, you will see them writing the punctuation OUTSDE of the quotation marks. But if you read the BBC, you will have already seen this.

Here are some fun links you might like to play with:

http://www.inyourpocket.com/northern-ireland/belfast/How-till-spake-Norn-Iron-A-Guide-to-Belfast-Phrases-70619f

http://www.cockneyrhymingslang.co.uk/rabbit

http://www.whoohoo.co.uk/cockney-translator.asp

[oona]

And this is really cute. Go to this page and choose the Cockney translation in the drop down menu and type in one of your DW entries URL or even your whole page. Then look at what it would sound like. :)

http://www.rinkworks.com/dialect/

[healingmirth]

Yeah, the original phrasing sounds completely British to me, and I'd notice it.

Bearing in mind that its past midnight and I've been wading through badfic, and thus am slightly numb to grammar at the moment:

If I were rewriting those to my experience of standard-usage American English, I'd say "I haven't got any money," which of course means the same thing as your rewrite, but I think does a better job of clarifying the original idiom?

That might be exactly what you were getting at with the helping verbs, though. I wouldn't have the first idea how to go about trying to track the linguistic (if that's even the word I'm looking for) evolution of those constructions.

[megyal]

What you have as 'confusing' just sounds like Britspeak to me. I don't know about American english but we'd say "I don't have any money" where I live.

[yourlibrarian]

I agree with the above comments -- it sounds formal and British to me. Although in the first example it sounds like a tense change as I'd expect the phrase to be "I hadn't any money."