Showing posts with label questions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label questions. Show all posts

do you have/have you/have you got

Dipping into the email bag, we have a months-old note from Andy:
I was wondering whether you've done anything on your language blog regarding the uses of the phrases "have you got", "do you have" and "have you". I get the impression that "do you have" is the preferred form in America, whilst "have you got" is more usual in Britain. "Have you" is maybe considered rather old-fashioned in the UK these days; I'm not sure about its status in the US however.
Andy, you are a talented observer of language. While we've covered a similar topic before (I haven't/I don't have/I haven't got--see the comments too), I'm particularly inspired to do this one today as I've just been reading a paper by Peter Trudgill that cites these constructions as providing evidence that BrE is being influenced by AmE--before concluding based on a broader range of evidence that "there is no conclusive evidence one way or the other for convergence/homogenisation or divergence/disintegration at the level of grammar."

To grammatically achieve a yes/no question in English, the question has to start with a verb. Not any verb, but an auxiliary verb (or 'helping verb'). (Verbs that aren't auxiliary verbs are called lexical verbs.) If you have an auxiliary-less sentence, then you usually have to add an auxiliary to fill that beginning-of-question slot. So, if you want to ask if someone wants a pineapple, you have to add the meaningless (in this case) auxiliary do just to fill out the question structure and make it grammatical: Do you want a pineapple? rather than Want you a pineapple? But have can be either a lexical verb (as in I have a pineapple) or an auxiliary verb (as in I have found a pineapple, where found is the lexical verb and have is there as an auxiliary to carry the tense). Verbs that don't need do-support for question formation and negation are sometimes called operators.

So, let's assume that one needs a pineapple (as I do now that I've thought of pineapples). So you stand on the street corner and ask passing strangers for a pineapple (as I'm about to do).

Starting with the shortest of the possibilities we have:
(1) Have you a pineapple?
Here we're using the stative meaning of have, 'to possess'. In the English of England*, only the stative meaning of lexical have can be an operator. (In Scotland and Ireland it may be possible, according to Trudgill, to use a more dynamic meaning of have as an operator, as in Had you pineapple for lunch?) Operator use of stative have is, according to John Algeo, "said to be somewhat old-fashioned British [...], but it is hardly imaginable in American" (p. 30). Americans know of it, of course, from the nursery song Baa, baa, black sheep (have you any wool?), but outside of storybook contexts, they wouldn't expect to run into it.

 BrE prefers our next candidate:

(2) Have you got a pineapple?

You can say this in AmE as well, but it's not the default way to ask for pineapple. Have got, of course, is sayable in non-questions as well. But considering that the British say it more than Americans, it's funny that Americans are more particular about what it means. As we've discussed before, AmE makes the distinction between have got for possession (I've got a pineapple) and requirements (I've got to go) and have gotten for acquisition (I've gotten a pineapple from the fridge). Many language pedants (or peevologists, as they have come to be known in the trade) on both sides of the Atlantic (but probably more US than UK) insist that have got should be avoided in the possession or requirement senses because have alone is more elegant. To them, I point out some of the quoted users of have got in the OED: William Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, W.M.Thackeray, Lewis Carroll...

At any rate, because we can say You have got some pineapple, we can ask Have you got some pineapple? Have is an operator in all dialects in this context. What differs is whether you prefer to say it that way. We'll look at the numbers after considering the final, and most AmE, possibility:
(3) Do you have a pineapple?
So, in this case, have is treated as a non-operator lexical verb, and do must come in and fill the operator space. This is the way we usually form questions with lexical verbs in English, and it's the preferred way for AmE speakers to form questions about possession.

Now what surprised me in investigating this was how much AmE prefers (3) over (2) (especially since I've seen have got derided as an ugly Americanism by uninformed BrE speakers). Using Mark Davies' Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the BYU-British National Corpus (BNC), I searched for 'Do you have [determiner]' and 'Have you got [determiner]'. By putting [determiner] at the end, I got all cases of Do you have any, Do you have some, Do you have those, Do you have a, etc., but none of Do you have to [verb], Have you got to [verb], or Have you got [verbed]. The result:
AmE: Do you have = 3092, Have you got = 99.  So 31:1.
BrE:  Do you have = 245, Have you got = 450.  So 1:<2.
Now, whether the two corpora are really comparable is debatable, but it's worth noting that COCA is about 20% spoken language and BNC is just under 18% spoken--so it shouldn't be just a difference in spoken-versus-written proportions that is making the differences so stark.


So, the lessons of today are:
  • If you are on a UK street corner, say Have you got a pineapple?
  • If you are on a US street corner, say Do you have a pineapple?
  • If you say Have you a pineapple?, you risk assault for non-normative behavio(u)r.

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FOOTNOTE
*I really resist writing English English, as word reduplication (as in Was it a salad salad? or I bought a book but not a book book) implies 'the real thing' or 'a prototypical exemplar'. And before you say 'but it is the real thing', which English English are you talking about?  
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quite wh-

Mark Liberman over on Language Log has blogged about the following sentence, which appeared in the Guardian today:
Quite who Fatah al-Islam are, or where they came from, is a matter of dispute.
Liberman finds the sentence-initial quite who very strange, preferring exactly who or just who. He suspects that it's BrE, though he shows through a search for these structures in the Guardian archives that quite who is the least common of the three even in BrE.

Quite who is no doubt less common than Just who or Exactly who, but it may be more common in speech than in writing. I approached Better Half on his way out of the shower this morning and asked him what he thought of Quite who he is is a mystery and Quite who does he think he is? His immediate reply was that they were fine things to say, but that they'd sound better spoken than they'd look written. (Then he gave me one of his 'Can I go now?' looks.)

To me, quite who sounds a bit worse than quite why, so I did a little investigation of this on my lunch hour. I haven't figured out how Liberman searched for just sentence-initial examples, so my methodology here is probably a bit different. I've searched for the following phrases on the Guardian website (representing BrE) and on the Boston Globe website (representing AmE), then looked at the first 50 and counted how many were sentence-initial. I'm counting as 'sentence initial' only those that start with an upper case letter or are preceded by a colon or semi-colon and those that are immediately preceded by just a discourse particle of some sort (e.g. Well, quite why that is...). There are many more that are clause-initial in subordinate clauses or that are complement clauses, but I'm not counting those. (*Some of these figures are more reliable than others. In particular, the just what figures include some things that weren't really sentences, but noun phrases, e.g. Just what the doctor ordered! Just what I didn't need! But scanning for capital Js was all I had time for.)
phraseBrE hits
BrE S-initialAmE hitsAmE S-initial






quite how452
42%214%






exactly how 1160
14%165010%








just how2770
32%372016%





quite why

109


72%

8

12.5%











exactly why227
6%3806%




just why114
34%8930%





quite what

419


16%

146

0











exactly what3940
053608%




just what*1140
20%2300

24%







quite who

7


43%

6

0











exactly who261
8%23216%




just who1030
48%22332%





What's striking here (or should that be quite what's striking here?) is how much more sentence-initial quite we see in BrE. But then, almost all of the percentages are greater for BrE than AmE. My theory is that the Guardian is more prone to ask (rhetorical) questions than the Globe (since newspapers here identify more with political positions than they do in the States, and therefore aren't shy about having leading questions with telling presuppositions here and there). But the differences between the BrE quite percentages and the AmE ones are pretty severe, which seems to support Liberman's hypothesis that sentence-initial quite is a Briticism.

Liberman goes on to say:
What I can't figure out is why Americans should object to "quite who" in subject position but not elsewhere. It seems to have something to do with polarity -- thus my judgments are:
I don't know exactly who is responsible.
I know exactly who is responsible.
I don't know quite who is responsible.
*I know quite who is responsible.
...
Do British speakers have different rules about the scope of polarity-licensing operators? Or is (this sense of) quite not really a polarity item for our British cousins, despite the evidence in the table above? Perhaps some well-informed and sociolinguistically-inclined syntactician or semanticist will enlighten this befuddled phonetician.
When referring to polarity here, Liberman is talking about how certain words have to go or not-go with negative words like not or nobody. (For example, already goes in positive sentences, but it has to be yet in negative ones: *I haven't slept already. So already is a negative polarity item.) I favo(u)r the 'quite is not as polar in BrE as in AmE' hypothesis.

Quite differs in many ways between BrE and AmE, and maybe some of these are related to Liberman's puzzle. First, there's the use of quite in BrE as a marker of agreement. Here's Robert Burchfield in Fowler's on the topic:
quite 1. A colloquial use that often puzzles or amuses visitors to Britain is the use of quite (or quite so) to express agreement (= 'I quite agree') with a previous declarative statement: e.g. 'The minister should have resigned.' 'Quite.' Other ways of expressing agreement exists (...), but quite, quite so and rather are the ones that are likely to be regarded as distinctly British by visitors.
Now, I think of quite as being the way that a BrE speaker dismisses someone else while paying lip-service to agreement. Here's the kind of thing I'm thinking of, from a Pirates of the Caribbean fan fiction site:
"Seishin, we should really get moving if you intend to finish this business soon" said her first mate, Victor, from the docks.
"Quite" she said shortly. Ignoring the plank, she jumped of the rail and landed neatly next to him.
In this context, the quite-sayer knows that Victor is right, but probably doesn't want to hear it from him (either because he interrupted her thinking about something else, or because she doesn't like her first mate bossing her around). Agreement quite is certainly not always said in a 'short' way, but it's a stereotypical way of using it.

Second, there's the fact that quite is often (but not always, the story is complicated--see Fowler's!) used to weaken the force of an adjective in BrE, while it strengthens the force in AmE. So, a sentence like that book was quite interesting is probably enthusiastic praise in AmE, but probably a damp squib of praise in BrE.
Now, these are not (quite!) the senses of quite that are operating in Liberman's examples, nevertheless I'm wondering whether some of these facts are somehow connected.
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can I get a latte grande?

Out for lunch Saturday with Better Half's Mum and her Better Half, when BHM'sBH declares "I hate it when English people take on American corporate jargon." I expected he was talking about thinking outside the box and investing in excellence. The latter is one of my pet peeves, as well as the current call-to-arms/pens by my university's management. ( I also hate that my university has a management team now instead of an administration.)

But no, BHM'sBH instead went on to talk about how he can tell who works for an American company when they open their mouths at Starbucks and say "Can I get a..." instead of "Can/May I have a...". If you ask to get a coffee, by his reasoning, you're asking to come (a)round to the other side of the counter and fix yourself a coffee. BH agrees with BHM'sBH that in the context of ordering a coffee can I get a means 'can I get myself a'.

Checking out can I get a on Google UK, some of the examples are:

can I get a qualification?
Can I get a regular health check at my GP surgery?
can i get a gmail invite?
Can I get a refund of unused portion of a season ticket...?
Can I get a refund on my parking permit?
Can I get a business grant to start up a new business in the Harrogate district?


Most of these are from FAQs, and are sincerely about ability ('Am I able to get a refund? How do I do it?'), rather than requests for things to be given. That's not surprising, as writing Can I get a decaf latte? on my website is unlikely to result in a hot beverage showing up beside me. (That's what yelling to BH in the kitchen was invented for.) The gmail invite example is the only one that stands out as a UK-located (but not necessarily UK) person requesting something using can i get a.

BrE speakers have no problem with saying I got a coffee on my way to work, meaning 'I took a coffee away from someplace where I ordered it'.

In can I get a, get is the converse of give:
Can I get a coffee (from you)? = Can you give me a coffee?

But it's not that the get/give opposition is American-only: on UK Google, one gets twice as many hits for get presents as for receive presents. Since one typically doesn't go and get one's presents from the giver ( one tends to passively receive them), it's clear here that British folk have the lexical/logical wherewithal to understand can I get a as a request.

I think is the real problem is that one learns early the 'polite' ways to ask for things, and this way is not in the British canon of polite requests. While get can mean a passive action of receiving, it also has other senses that are closer to take--which probably colo(u)rs people's perceptions of get's connotations. So, if you're brought up on saying can I have a, then can I get a might sound a little more greedy/impolite.

But why doesn't it sound less polite to American ears? (Especially if it's a relatively new locution there too?) Three possibilities, which don't rule one another out:

1 - Perhaps it does sound less polite to Americans too. To me can I get a sounds a little more brusque and self-cent(e)red than can I have a. (But maybe I've been influenced by my surroundings.)

2 - Perhaps it is slightly less polite in both dialects, but it's less important to sound "polite" in America. (The word polite is a bit loaded here. I'm using it to mean something like 'indirect/genteel'.) The US is known for its solidarity politeness system and for its individualistic culture. In a solidarity culture, one wants to act as if everyone's on the same social level. The UK is historically a deference culture, in which people's societal roles are more distinguished and great pains are taken not to inflict oneself on others unnecessarily. The UK has been shifting toward solidarity styles since at least the second world war, but is still not as far along that path as the US. The importation of (and unease with) can I get a may be a symptom of that shift.

3 - Or perhaps it's just that anything that sounds American grates on British ears and sounds less polite, just by association with Americans and stereotypes of Americans.

I think it's probably a combination of all of these.
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Abbr.

AmE = American English
BrE = British English
OED = Oxford English Dictionary (online)