could of (was 'dialect in novels')

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:13 PM -0600 2/24/01, Victoria Neufeldt wrote:
>Herb Stahlke wrote on Saturday, February 24, 2001 10:25 AM
>>
>>  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
>
>I have never come up with a satisfactory analysis of what exactly is
>happening in these cases, or what to call the phenomenon.  It seems that if
>a person writes the preposition 'of' instead of the auxiliary 'have' or even
>its contraction, that person must be actually interpreting the word in
>question as 'of' and not just doing a written version of misspeaking.  It
>seems to be an unconscious thing though; they probably would not accept "I
>of gone, you of gone", etc. in a conjugation of the past perfect tense of
>'go'.  Maybe it's vaguely thought of as being part of a set phrase with
>'could' or 'would' and not tied to the following past participle?  Or does
>'of' have a new meaning and/or function to permit such a construction?  Are
>there any other examples of this kind of thing?

And then there's "If I'd've gone...", sometimes rendered "If I'd of
gone", where (as we've discussed earlier) "If I'd have gone"
(presumably representing "If I would have gone", not "If I had have
gone") is frequent but not prescribed.

larrry