"being have"

[Lynne Murphy]

--On Thursday, September 6, 2001 7:31 pm -0400 George Thompson
<george.thompson at NYU.EDU> wrote:

> Lynne Murphy objects that in the passage
>     "She came in on the Charleston wave, / What I told you, she just
> won't have"
> "there's no 'be' there--so I don't think this is a case of 'to be have'
> at all.  "
>
> But "will" (won't) is the future tense of "be".  So that in this
> instance the idea of "being have" is so assimilated that the verb has
> been adapted.

I don't see this at all.  I parse 'being haive' as be + adj or adv, and one
can't saw "I won't happy" or "I won't there"--you've gotta have the 'be'.


>
> I'll concede that this analysis/joke on of "behave" is sufficiently
> obvious that it may have been invented ndependently many times.  I
> think I don't concede that "she just won't have" should be read as "she
> just won't 'have" ("behave" truncated of its first syllable).

Yeah, Arnold's probably right on this point.

Lynne



M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

phone +44-(0)1273-678844
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