"sort've"

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Wed Oct 13 00:21:18 UTC 2010


At 6:06 PM -0400 10/12/10, Michael Covarrubias wrote:
>in a transcription of an interview by brian gaar (interviewing
>comedian marc maron)
>http://www.austin360.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/comedy/entries/2010/10/11/marc_maron.html
>
>maron:
>
>"we were able to rebuild our friendship that had become sort've
>strained and you can sort've hear that."
>
>interesting orthographic reversal of the usual switch: have > of
>
>it's been mentioned in the ever responsive (and equally imprecise)
>urban dictionary:
>
>"it's the new would of! Serves to demonstrate that "have" and "of"
>are now completely interchangeable"
>
>bit of an overstatement.
>
>michael

Note as further evidence of a reanalysis the existence of a
full-fledged "sort have"; in some cases, morphological analysis is
clearly the least of the posters' problems:

==============
basically I sort have disconnected the battery,...

I sort have the same problem, i think it'd be better if i could just
leave this world, then i would only have a few mourners,...

"That's another thing I think I sort have done backward a little bit,
which is I don't tend to write on violin," she says

So, I sort have to pull them away from that and say look, that's Mike
Meyers's creation.

once the song finished i sort have forgot that i was listening to music

im looking forward to more gas mask videos i sort have a little
fetish for gas masks

i sort have been doing my own thing
============
...and so on.  283 actual g-hits for "I sort have", mostly relevant
to the reanalysis at issue.

LH

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list