dialect in novels

Mark Odegard markodegard at HOTMAIL.COM
Fri Feb 23 23:26:57 UTC 2001


>I believe that the short written forms "gonna" and "gotta" are synonymous
>with their respective standard written forms.
>The equivalent in standardese of "I'm gonna go to London" is "I'm going to
>go to London," not "I'm going to London." (You need two "go's" in the
>second sentence as well, since "gonna" means "going to", not "going to
>go".)  And again, the standard written form of "I gotta go to London" would
>be
>"I've [or I have] got to go to London."  (The "have" or "-'ve" is actually
>often included in the fast-speech version as well.
>On the other hand, the statement "I got to go to London" is in fact
>ambiguous without more context, because it could just as easily be intended
>to mean "I (-'ve) got to go to London."
>You could disambiguate it by adding either "yesterday" or
>"tomorrow", as appropriate.
>
>Victoria

I may be in a minority, or merely may be a little ahead of the stream, but
'gotta' works as a modal auxiliary. The sense is essentially that of 'must'.
"I gotta go" is not "I got to go".

As written English, "I have got to go" is the one that's ambiguous to me.

With 'got', there are some things going on that I cannot explain, but would
dearly like to know. The British, so I gather, are puzzled by some AmE
usages of 'got'. Have/has seems to no longer be necessary before certain
such usages of 'got'.

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