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British English
We all learn the forms to HAVE and to HAVE GOT in Europe. What about their real usage in the UK and USA. As far as I know the latter is not used in the STates......
Exemples: I have a car = I possess a car I've got a car he has a lover he has got a lover
We would say all of those in the US, skippa. They don't strike me as particularly British.
I've got a car!
He's got a lover! My lover's got me! My mum's got a headache! My sister's got a fiance! My dog's got a look on his face that says he wants to go out! My boss has got delusions of grandeur! The Prime Minister has similar misconceived ideas! I've got a feeling there is absolutely no difference beween British English and American English when it comes to simple, everyday phrases such as these. I've got a feeling we've covered this sort of thing before in here.....
I think that especially in Europe, the differences between American and British dialects really get overstated and enshrined in popular myth. I remember reading an English translation of an Italian book on the US that contained the passage "Can Americans even be said to speak English?" Well, apparently, as I read the book cover to cover and didn't have to pull out my dictionary even once....but many people cling firmly to that belief.
If you wanted to be really exact, I think in "has got" constructions, the American tendency is to reduce the has to the contraction 's or to leave out the got, so "My boss has got delusions of grandeur" may often come out as "My boss's got delusions of grandeur" or "My boss has delusions of grandeur". But there are certainly occasions where we might say the full "has got", so it's not a dialectical rule by any means. And all of those examples are perfectly acceptable in standard English grammar.
Both are used in all forms of English - 'I have a' is generally the preferred written form as 'got' is largely superfluous in every sentence.
In ordinary day to day rapid speech - and we all speak much faster than we think we do....ask anybody who is learning English as a second Language in the early stages, or who is a foreign tourist with limited English Language skills who stops you in the street to ask for directions and they will tell you in no uncertain terms: "Ach - vill you speak more slowly, pleez!"
I have a habit of speaking at quite a rate of knots. When saying something like: "My boss has got delusions of grandeur" - verbatim, then it invariably comes out as: "My boss's got delusions of grandeur", as stated above. It's just natural speech that way. We all skim over the conjunctions and prepositions and fill in words so rapidly that they barely exist in speech - it's bedtime for me now at 00:58hrs Thursday 19/02 so it's a case of "up the apples'n'pears" to bed....that's stairs in rhyming slang. Actually I don't need to climb the apples'n'stairs - my PC's in my bedroom (no - not a copper!) and it's already up the apples'n'pears.
"I think that especially in Europe, the differences between American and British dialects really get overstated and enshrined in popular myth...."
I have noticed this a lot myself and have even had non-native speakers in Europe ofen try to "convince" me that AE is something *very* different from BE. I find it shocking that someone who isn't even a native speaker would do this. I know what language I speak and as an American I understand most BE perfectly and have been told by many BE speakers that some Americans are actually easier to understand than some of their own country(wo)men, yet this "myth" persist. Where does it come from?
Of course, why not? We've made it into an art form. I reckon it's all down to cold, hard facts - the UK has a much wider range of accents all packaged together into a very tiny little island than does the United States which is about a gazillion trillion times larger.
This country is made up of streets and roads and avenues and groves and crescents where the people living on one side...all the properties with even numbers........find it exceedingly difficult to fathom out what the heck the people on the opposite side.......the ones in properties with odd numbers.......are banging on about....local linguistic, accentual and dialectal incomprehension here really is that complex.
<< This country is made up of streets and roads and avenues and groves and crescents where the people living on one side...all the properties with even numbers........find it exceedingly difficult to fathom out what the heck the people on the opposite side.......the ones in properties with odd numbers.......are banging on about....local linguistic, accentual and dialectal incomprehension here really is that complex. >>
Haha that's so true!! Here in Devon, it certainly proves difficult to understand the Somerset dialect, even from the neighbouring county - and I live near the border, so that's only about 5 miles away!
I've noticed a tendency among many Americans to drop the contracted auxiliary 's or 've altogether and just leave the 'got' when using 'have got' and 'have got to':
I got some cash he got a new car she got her sister at home. you got to see this From the context it's clear that they mean 'have' or 'have to' and not 'received'. A consequence of this is that they treat 'got' as verb distinct from 'get' and form questions and negatives using auxiliary 'do' as though 'got' were a verb in its own right: do you got the time? you don't got a clue I don't got to tell you anything
>> I've noticed a tendency among many Americans to drop the contracted auxiliary 's or 've altogether and just leave the 'got' when using 'have got' and 'have got to':
I got some cash he got a new car she got her sister at home. you got to see this From the context it's clear that they mean 'have' or 'have to' and not 'received'. A consequence of this is that they treat 'got' as verb distinct from 'get' and form questions and negatives using auxiliary 'do' as though 'got' were a verb in its own right: do you got the time? you don't got a clue I don't got to tell you anything << Yes, many people do that. However we do not consider it to be standard or correct.
I agree that we Americans use 'got' a lot and wouldn't ordinarily have trouble understanding British uses of it. (I suppose we do use 'have gotten' more often than the British do, though.)
>do you got the time? you don't got a clue I don't got to tell you anything< Except for that last one, though, I wouldn't use those. I'd say 'have' instead of 'do' in the first one (or instead of 'got'). Or else I'd shorten the question to 'Got the time?' Yahoo search results: "do you got the time" 1,040 [many in a particular song] "have you got the time" 42,300 "do you have the time" 679,000 I wouldn't say 'you don't got a clue' either. I'd say 'you don't have a clue'. "you don't got a clue" 760 "you ain't got a clue" 16,100 [non-standard or very colloquial] "you don't have a clue" 1,030,000 I'd say 'I don't got to tell you anything' only as an emphatic denial to the claim 'you got to tell me'. I'd be quoting the 'got to tell me' in a way that the odd syntax would put emphasis on it.
What about American and British pronunciation and intonation (particularly the posh one)? Sometimes they sound like two different languages.....Try to hear The Queen and Britney Spears? Do they speak the same language?
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