must of have??

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Jan 12, 2010, at 7:05 AM, Charlie Doyle wrote:

> Though the faulty-editing hypothesis is plausible, I gotta say:  The
> "must of have" (or "musta have") construction does not sound wholly
> bizarre to me.

back in 2007 i looked at a large number of HAVE HAVE examples, of
several different types.  these included cases of
   would have Adverb have
   would have have [where the second "have" seems to be the modal]
   would have have [where the second "have" is a main verb]
plus occurrences of
   would have Verb [with a base-form main verb other than "have"]

(all of these could have versions with "would've" or "woulda" or
"would of" rather than "would have".)

some of these might be faulty edits (or repairs in speech), but there
are so many of them that it's unlikely they all are.  my
interpretation at the time was, following a suggestion of Joyce Tang
Boyland's, that some occurrences of "would have" etc. represent a
grammaticalization of the sequence as a modal on its own.

i now see that "must have" (again, with variants) has a similar
distribution.  so charlie's feeling that "must of have" isn't totally
bizarre has some basis.

these structures are, of course, non-standard, but they appear to be
patterns available to some speakers.

as usual, it can be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to decide
what's going on in any particular instance.

arnold

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