11.1624, Disc: Queen's English/American English

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LINGUIST List:  Vol-11-1624. Wed Jul 26 2000. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 11.1624, Disc: Queen's English/American English

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1)
Date:  Wed, 26 Jul 2000 09:10:54 -0400
From:  "Mike Maxwell" <mike_maxwell at sil.org>
Subject:  have gone/ am gone (was: American English Influence on the Queen's          English)

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Wed, 26 Jul 2000 09:10:54 -0400
From:  "Mike Maxwell" <mike_maxwell at sil.org>
Subject:  have gone/ am gone (was: American English Influence on the Queen's          English)

In Linguist List 11.1622, Ronald Sheen (Ronald_Sheen at UQTR.UQuebec.CA)
writes:
>David Fertig pointed out that there are
>"semi-Britishisms that slip into the American version apparently unnoticed.
>The most obvious is when the American narrator asks: "Where have all the
>Teletubbies gone?", where an American would almost always say: "Where did
>all the Teletubbies go?"
>
>I doubt this..."Where have all the Teletubbies gone?" and the other form
are
>both quite normal North American English.

I agree that this is quite common (I grew up in the Midwest).  But rather
than simply agree, I would like to ask a semi-related question.

To my knowledge, "gone" is the only past participle (as opposed to passive
participle) in modern English which can take a form of "be" as the Aux verb.
Thus, for me "I am gone" is at least as good, and probably better than, "I
have gone".  Until I saw Ronald Sheen's example above, I hadn't noticed that
there is something else going on here: if a destination follows "gone" (or
in Sheen's example, the trace of wh-movement--apologies if traces and tooth
fairies fall into the same class for you :-)), "have gone" is better; "is
gone" is better when there is no destination.  That is:

    I am/ ?have gone.
    I ?am/ have gone to the store.
    Where ??are/ have they gone?

Note also "He has been gone for several hours now."

This would be explicable if "gone" were ambiguous between an adjective and a
past participle, but it fails every other test I can think of for
adjective-hood.  And of course it seems unlikely to be a passive.

Has anyone looked into this?  My edition (1979) of Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech
and Svartvik, which discusses nearly everything else about English :-), has
says nothing to say about this.  I can summarize comments for the list.

                                         Mike Maxwell
                                         SIL
                                         Mike_Maxwell at sil.org

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