Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-xfwgj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-24T06:12:56.688Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Have went – an American usage problem1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2015

INGRID TIEKEN-BOON VAN OSTADE  and
VIKTORIJA KOSTADINOVA
INGRID TIEKEN-BOON VAN OSTADE
Affiliation:
Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, University of Leiden, Postbus 9515, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlandsi.m.tieken@hum.leidenuniv.nl; v.kostadinova@hum.leidenuniv.nl
VIKTORIJA KOSTADINOVA
Affiliation:
Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, University of Leiden, Postbus 9515, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlandsi.m.tieken@hum.leidenuniv.nl; v.kostadinova@hum.leidenuniv.nl
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Have went may seem a straightforward non-standard grammatical form today, but it evidently has a different status in British and American English. While in British English it developed into a non-standard form after the codification of the strong verb system by the eighteenth-century normative grammarians, in American English it became a usage problem. This we concluded from its appearance primarily in usage guides published in the United States over the years. The current status of the variant in the region was confirmed by evidence we encountered both in anonymous surveys and in face-to-face interviews with native speakers of American English. Our findings for the differences in status of have went in the course of its history were supported by corpus-based analyses of historical and modern text corpora for British and American English, while a close analysis of selected modern instances of have went and have gone showed a different distribution between the two that appears to warrant a perceived difference in meaning noted by some of the American informants.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 19 , Special Issue 2: Sense of place in the history of English , July 2015 , pp. 293 - 312
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

This article was written in the context of the research project Bridging the Unbridgeable: Linguists, Prescriptivists and the General Public, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and directed by Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade. We are grateful to the editors and an anonymous referee for their comments on an earlier version of this article.

References

American National Biography Online, www.anb.org/articles/home.html (Summer 2014).Google Scholar
Anon. 1856?. Live and learn: A guide for all, who wish to speak and write correctly. New York: Dick & Fitzgerald.Google Scholar
Baker, Robert. 1770. Reflections on the English language. London: J. Bell.Google Scholar
Baker, Robert. 1779. Reflections on the English language, 2nd edn. London: J. Bell.Google Scholar
van Bergen, Linda & Denison, David. 2007. A corpus of late 18c prose. In Beal, Joan C., Corrigan, Karen P. & Moisl, Hermann L. (eds.), Creating and digitizing language corpora, 228−46. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
BNC: British National Corpus, www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk (Summer 2014).Google Scholar
Brians, Paul. 2003. Common errors in English usage. Wilsonville, OR: William, James & Co.Google Scholar
Bridging the Unbridgeable (blog): http://bridgingtheunbridgeable.com/.Google Scholar
British Newspapers 1600−1950, Gale Digital Collections, http://gdc.gale.com/products/19th-century-british-library-newspapers-part-i-and-part-ii/ (December 2014).Google Scholar
Busse, Ulrich & Schröder, Anne. 2006. From prescriptivism to descriptivism? 140 years of English usage guides: some old and new controversies. In Houswitschka, Christoph, Knappe, Gabriele & Müller, Anja (eds.), Anglistentag 2005, Bamberg: Proceedings, 457−73. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag.Google Scholar
Busse, Ulrich & Schröder, Anne. 2009. Fowler's Modern English Usage at the interface of lexis and grammar. In Römer, Ute & Schulze, Rainer (eds.), Exploring the lexis-grammar interface, 69−87. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
COCA: Corpus of Contemporary American English, http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ (Summer 2014).Google Scholar
COHA: Corpus of Historical American English, http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/ (Summer 2014).Google Scholar
Corpus of Late 18th-Century Prose, www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/subjects/lel/research/DavidDenison/corpus-late-18th-century-prose/ (Summer 2014).Google Scholar
Corpus of Late Modern English Prose, http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/david.denison/lmode_prose.html (Summer 2014).Google Scholar
Denison, David. 1994. A corpus of late Modern English prose. In Kytö, Merja, Rissanen, Matti & Wright, Susan (eds.), Corpora across the centuries, 7−16. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Görlach, Manfred. 2001. Eighteenth-century English. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter.Google Scholar
Greenwood, James. 1711. An essay towards a practical English grammar. London: R. Tookey.Google Scholar
Harris, James. 1751. Hermes, or, A philosophical inquiry concerning language and universal grammar. London: H. Woodfall.Google Scholar
Hoey, Michael. 2009. Corpus linguistics and word meaning. In Lüdeling, Anke & Kytö, Merja (eds.), Corpus linguistics: An international handbook, vol. 2, 972–87. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney & Pullum, Geoffrey. 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
HUGE: Hyper Usage Guide of English, www.huge.ullet.net (Summer 2014).Google Scholar
Hurd, Seth T. 1847. A grammatical corrector. Philadelphia: E. H. Butler & Co.Google Scholar
Ilson, Robert. 1985. Usage problems in British and American English. In Greenbaum, Sidney (ed.), The English language today, 166−82. Oxford: Pergamon Institute of English.Google Scholar
Kortmann, Bernd, Burridge, Kate, Mesthrie, Rajend, Schneider, Edgar W. & Upton, Clive (eds.). 2004. A handbook of varieties of English, vol. 2: Morphology and Syntax. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kostadinova, Viktorija. In progress. Attitudes to usage in American English. PhD thesis, University of Leiden.Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey. 1974. Semantics. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Leonard, S. A. 1929. The doctrine of correctness in English usage, 1700−1800. Madison: University of Wisconsin.Google Scholar
Louw, Bill. 1993. Irony in the text or insincerity in the writer? The diagnostic potential of semantic prosodies. In Baker, Mona, Gill, Francis & Tognini-Bonelli, Elena (eds.), Text and technology: In honour of John Sinclair, 157–76. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Milroy, James & Milroy, Lesley. 1999. Authority in language. Investigating language prescription and standardization, 3rd edn. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Murray, Thomas E. & Simon, Beth Lee. 2004. Colloquial American English: grammatical features. In Kortmann et al. (eds.), 221−44.Google Scholar
Old Bailey Online, www.oldbaileyonline.org (December 2014).Google Scholar
Preston, Dennis R. 1999. Introduction. In Preston, Dennis R. (ed.), Handbook of perceptual dialectology, vol.1, xxiii−xl. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ritchie, Harry. 2013. English for the natives. London: John Murray.Google Scholar
Sinclair, John. 2003. Reading concordances: An introduction. Edinburgh: Pearson Education Limited.Google Scholar
Sinclair, John (ed. with Ronald Carter). 2004. Trust the text: Language, corpus and discourse. London and New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stubbs, Michael. 2009. The search for units of meaning: Sinclair on empirical semantics. Applied Linguistics 30 (1), 115–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sundby, Bertil, Bjørge, Anne Kari & Haugland, Kari E.. 1991. A dictionary of English normative grammar 1700–1800. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid. 2008. Henry Fowler and his eighteenth-century predecessors. Bulletin of the Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas 51, 5−24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid. 2011. The bishop's grammar: Robert Lowth and the rise of prescriptivism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid. 2013. Studying attitudes to English usage – Investigating prescriptivism in a large research project. English Today 29 (3), 3–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid. 2014. Have went? English Today 30 (1), 11–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid. 2015. Five hundred mistakes corrected: An early American English usage guide. In Dossena, Marina (ed.), Transatlantic perspectives on Late Modern English, 55–72. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid. Forthcoming. From codification to prescriptivism: towards a norm for standard English. In Brinton, Laurel (ed.). Approaches to English historical linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Vizetelly, Frank H. 1920. A desk-book of errors in English. New York: Funk & Wagnalls.Google Scholar
Webster's dictionary of English usage. 1989. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster Inc.Google Scholar
Weiner, Edmund. 1988. On editing a usage guide. In Stanley, Eric Gerard & Hoad, T. F. (eds.), Words. For Robert Burchfield's sixty-fifth birthday, 171–83. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.Google Scholar
Wolfram, Walt. 2004. Urban African American Vernacular English: Morphology and syntax. In Kortmann et al. (eds.), 319–40.Google Scholar