dialect in novels

[Herb Stahlke]

Auxiliary have brings up a variant on eye-dialect, one in which
the spelling is conventional but the grammar not.  I come across
"would of", "could of", etc. pretty regularly in student writing,
and I've found it also in novels where the writer is portraying
the speech of teenagers.  Since "third of" and "would have" end
the same way phonetically, the substitution in our students' minds
isn't surprising.  Using it to portray immature and perhaps less
educated persons suggests some of the same demeaning intent that
lies behind eye dialect.

Herb

>>> vneufeldt at MERRIAM-WEBSTER.COM 02/23/01 05:24PM >>>
(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.