"being have"

[George Thompson]

This debate is going beyond what I had anticipated.

In the context of the song, "She just won't have" undoubtedly
means "she just won't act in a decorous manner because she is too
spirited, too full of the spirit of jazz".

If we do not derive the statement "She just won't have" from the
expression "be have" (= "act nice"), then from what idiom do we derive
it?

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African
Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998.

----- Original Message -----
From: Lynne Murphy <lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK>
Date: Friday, September 7, 2001 9:07 am
Subject: Re: "being have"

> --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
> fax   +44-(0)1273-671320
>