Hadda

[Dennis R. Preston]

Rudy,

The traces of these back-and-fro formations are even more exotic. I have
many slips (from speech) showing such goodies as:

Would've he've gone?
If he would've of been there, we ...

It's too easy to say that these are  "performance" slips. I think there is
something much more deeply diversifying at foot in the good-ole AE aux
system.

dInIs

>Thanks to Pat for reminding us of the fascinating back-formed
>reconstruction "hadda", which gets more formally represented as "had of",
>presumably from the reduced form of "would have", namely "'d've":
>
>        If I would have been there,
>        If I'd've been there,
>        If I'd'a@ been there,
>        If I hadda been there,
>        If I had've/had of been there,
>
>Rudy


Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736