could of (was 'dialect in novels')

[Dennis R. Preston]

>Not to mention "If I'd've not've gone" and lots of other "doubles"
>I've collected over the years. Truth is, we don't really understand
>the tense-aspect-modality system of any variety of spoken English
>very well. That there is an "of" in this system which is not reduced
>"have" is obvious (for people will say it in contrastive stress
>situations), but it's morphosyntactic identity has yet, I think, to
>be uncovered. I thiink its the best theoretical-descriptive project
>(with even some room for experimentalism) in current US English.

dInIs









>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

--
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