"Shouldn't ought"

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Jul 27, 2005, at 9:12 AM, Alice Faber wrote:

> Likewise 60s suburban New York (my parents are from NYC). I don't
> think
> I ever "outgrew" it. At any rate, I remember confusing grad school
> classmates by introducing the expression into classroom discussions of
> more "conventional" double modals.

"ought" is an interesting case; for most speakers these days it's
just barely a modal.  like the central modals, it's finite-only (*to
ought to VP).  for a lot (but not all) speakers, it can be negated,
either affixally or with "not" (you oughtn't/ought not to talk like
that); this is marginal for me.  however, most modern american
speakers can't invert positive "ought" (*ought you to talk so loud?),
though if you get "oughtn't" you can probably invert it (oughtn't you
to talk louder?).  i think that very few people can get VP ellipsis
with "ought" (*I ought to leave, and you ought, also); instead,
infinitival "to" allows ellipsis (I ought to leave, and you ought to,
also).

so "ought" is a bit like the modal "must", and is also a bit like the
non-modal obligative verb "have" (I hate to have to tell you this, *I
haven't to eat this, *Have I to eat this?  *You have to eat this, and
I have, also).  the crucial modal property of "ought", however, is
the first one, the finite-only restriction, which would predict that
"ought" cannot be the complement of a modal (since modals take base-
form VP complements), so that "shouldn't ought to" ought to be
ungrammatical.  this is exactly the situation with more conventional
double modals, like "might could" (and modals in the complement of
"useta", as in "useta could"; "useta" isn't a modal, though it does
have the finite-only property).

like (many) double modals, "shouldn't oughta" is also semantically
noncompositional; instead of meaning 'shouldn't be obliged to', it's
just an emphatic "shouldn't".  (you can work out how this could come
about historically, but synchronically the combination is just an
idiom.)

"shouldn't oughta" is *unlike* the conventional double modals in its
geographical distribution.  the conventional double modals are
primarily a southern thing, but "shouldn't oughta" is much more
widely distributed, as we've seen from comments in this thread.  i
myself can't use things like "might could" unselfconsciously, but
"shouldn't oughta" is just colloquial english for me.

i'm hoping someone has actually studied this distribution.  i'm away
from my copy of DARE; is "shouldn't oughta" in volume IV?

arnold