Separated by a Common Language: hadn't have VERBed

A great thing about being Facebook friends with linguists is that I get to benefit from their daily observations of English. Here's a recent observation from John Wells:

Something I've just heard on the telly about someone who nearly drowned: "If the fisherman hadn't've spotted him, he might not have survived."
I keep hearing this grammatical construction in BrE, with extra "have" ('ve) as compared with the standard "...hadn't spotted...".
But I have never come across any comment on, or discussion of, this usage.

In the comments, some people claim it's much used in the US, but it soon becomes clear that at least some of them were talking about a different construction than Wells was talking about. So, let's look at it.

I'm using the News on the Web corpus (because my usual GloWbE corpus isn't co(-)operating in giving me the contractions). There I searched for "had n't have VERB" and got it with a range of verbs:

Where do those examples come from? Mostly the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. So it's not looking like a particularly American feature.

I didn't find any examples in the NOW corpus of hadn't've, which is not surprising, since double contractions are a more spoken phenomenon, less likely to be found on news sites (and as we've seen before, they're more common in written AmE than in written BrE).

Since the News on the Web Corpus is mostly edited English, I didn't expect to find a lot of examples where the have is represented as of, but the 13 I did fine were from those same countries. And this isn't surprising because as we've seen before, 've>of is more common in BrE than in AmE:

So, it's looking pretty British, but in Caroline McAfee's 'Characteristics of non-standard grammar in Scotland', we get this "as in American English". (Bold = my emphasis, so it's clear which [more BrE] bits of the example we're talking about.)

In Scottish speech, as in American English, there is a sequence had – (ENCLITIC NEGATIVE PARTICLE) – have PAST PARTICIPLE. The identity of the second have, which appears as a weak or enclitic form, is problematic (as witness the writers who spell it of):

‘Ah wouldnae of came if Ah had of knew,’ he insisted (Helen W. Pryde, the First Book of the McFlannels, 1947: 24)

Adams (1948) suggested that it was a survival of English dialectal y- before past participles, reinterpreted as have via the latter’s weak form a. The occurrence of the form in Scotland and the USA is compatible with diffusion from Ulster. Fodor and Smith (1978) offer a purely synchronic analysis, seeing the first have as a modal and the second as the auxiliary of the perfect.

So what about that "as in American English"? Well, the historical picture in Google Ngrams gives us a different story from the contemporary NOW corpus:

Though in this century, hadn't have had looks more British, before 1880, it seemed to be all-American. This was shortly after the "Great Migration" from Ulster, through which large numbers of Northern Irish Protestants (with Scottish heritage) moved to the colonies.

But why, if the construction comes from Scotland, don't we see more in the earlier period here? It might just come down to the fact that this is a corpus of books, and not everyone gets to publish books: maybe New World Scots found it easier to get into print than the Old World ones—after all, they were now removed from the social structures that may not have favo(u)red them in publishing. Maybe UK-located speakers/writers of the time were more aware of the non-standardness of the construction and therefore less likely to use it.

The lesser use of it over time in AmE may be an effect of the lesser use of the perfect verb forms in AmE, whereby AmE now often uses simple past tense (I ate) instead of the perfect, as in I had eaten. It's hard to stick an extra have into your perfect verb string if you dialect doesn't use perfect verb forms much.

Separated by a Common Language

Observations on British and American English by an American linguist in the UK

hadn't have VERBed

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