Showing posts with label contractions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label contractions. Show all posts

double contractions

In the last post, I looked at of instead of have after modal verbs--as in should of gone and might of known--in contrast to the more standard spelling of the contraction 've: should've gone, might've known.  As we saw there, the of spelling was more prevalent in British online writing than American.

I promised then to look at what happens after negation. Here are the options (sticking with contracted have):
could not 've could not of
couldn't 've couldn't of
Again, I'm looking for these in the GloWBE corpus of English from the web. When I search for the of variants, I have to specifically search for a verb after the of in order to block out things like of course or of necessity, where the of isn't standing for have.

The full not versions in the first row of the table offer no surprises. Just as with the modals, there are more of spellings in the British than in the American (126 v 86).
The double-contracted versions in the bottom row get a bit more attention because I've been wanting to investigate the prevalence of double contractions, like n't've and 'd've. I use them quite a bit in writing and often get comments on them, so I've wondered if they're a more American thing. It's important here to remember that we're talking about writing, not speech. I'm not wondering if people say couldn't've--they do. I'm wondering whether they're (orig. AmE) ok with writing it.
First, the expected news: the of variants are more common in BrE, just as they were in the non-negated data. 85 American occurrences v 170 BrE.  Here's the top of the results table:


As you can see, some verbs show greater numbers with AmE, but this is to be expected because the numbers are small and because some of the verbs are used more in AmE than BrE--like figured, which is cut off the table. What's most important is the fact that the British total is twice as high as the American.

Is that just because BrE uses the present perfect (the reason for the have/'ve/of in these verb strings) more than AmE does? If that were so, we'd expect for the 've form to be more typical of British too, but that's not the case:



The tables in the previous post make this case more strongly, since here have the complication of whether people avoid writing double contractions. To test this a bit further, I've looked for another double contraction: 'd've, as in If I knew you were coming, I'd've baked a cake.

This table is a bit confusing because I searched for *'d 've. The 'd  is supposed to be separated from the word before in the corpus, but obviously that didn't happen all the time. So, the first line includes all the I'd'ves and and other things and the lower lines are other items that hadn't been input in the corpus in the right way and aren't included in the first line. It looks like the British part of the corpus suffers a bit more from bad coding of double-contractions. So, looking at the 'total' line at the bottom, there are more AmE double contractions, but not that many more: 67 versus 60.

Looking again at whether of is used instead of 've, it's still more British (59 total) than American (26 total) after 'd. Here's the top of the list:


So, it's not looking like British writers avoid double contractions all that much more than American writers--unless writing of instead of 've is part of an avoidance strategy. 

I found it interesting in the sheet music pictured above (and more than one version of it), it has been printed with a space before the 've. That's another solution--and perhaps that was more common in earlier days? The corpus would not distinguish between the space-ful version and space-less.

And on that note:


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might of, would of, could of, should of

A few years ago, The Telegraph ran an article about Americanisms on the BBC—or rather, an article about complaints about Americanisms on the BBC:
Nick Seaton, Campaign for Real Education, said: “It is not a surprise that a few expressions have crept in but the BBC should be setting an example for people and not indulging any slopping Americanised slang.”
(Tangent: I had to look up slopping, which doesn't seem to be used much as an adjective. Is he using the British slang 'dressing in an informal manner' or the American slang for 'gushing; speaking or writing effusively'? Or is slopping here being used as a euphemistic substitution for another word that ends in -ing?)

But (of course!) half of the 'Americanisms' in their closing list of 'Americanisms that have annoyed BBC listeners' weren't Americanisms. One (face up) was first (to the OED's knowledge) used by Daniel Defoe, the Englishman. Another (a big ask) is an Australianism. But one that really bothered me was this:
  • 'It might of been' instead of 'It might have been'
 Three reasons it bothered me:
  1. Shouldn't it might of been be corrected to it might've been rather than it might have been? That is, of is a misspelling of the similar-sounding 've here. Might've is perfectly good contraction in BrE as well as AmE. Is the complaint that people should say have because they shouldn't be contracting verbs on the BBC, or are they complaining about spelling 've wrong?
  2. We're talking about broadcast television and radio, which are spoken media. You can't see the spelling of what the presenters are saying. So how do they know the presenters said might of and not might've?  Of course, they could have seen it on the (orig. NAmE) closed-captioning/subtitles. But BBC subtitles usually make so little sense that I can't believe anyone would take them as an accurate record of what's been said. (Here's a Daily Mail collection of 'BBC subtitle blunders'.)
  3. I read of instead of 've a lot in my British students' essays. A lot. There's no reason to think they're getting it from American influence, because they'd have to read it and they probably don't get the chance to read a lot of misspel{ed/t} American English. The American books or news they read will have (we hope) been proofread. I suspect that errors like this aren't learn{ed/t}from exposure at all: they are re-invented by people who have misinterpreted what they've heard or who have a phonetic approach to spelling, sounding out the words in their minds as they write.
This particular Telegraph list is one of the things that I mock when I go around giving my How America Saved the English Language talk.  But so far, when I've talked about it, I've just said those three things about it. I have never looked up the numbers for who writes of and who writes 've after a modal verb. I think I've been afraid to, in case it just proved the Telegraph right that it's a very American thing.

I need not have feared! Not only was I right that I see it a lot in the UK, I was also right to feel that I probably see it more in the UK, because —you know what?— the British spell this bit of English worse than Americans.

Here are the numbers from the Corpus of Global Web-Based English. The numbers stand for how many times these variations occur within about 387 million words of text from the open internet.

non-standard of American British
might of 392 672
would of 926 1634
could of 458 821
should of 442 683
standard 've American British
might've 506  277
would've 4921 3121
could've 2379 1502
should've 1685 1140


I've put the higher number in each row in blue bold in my table in order to reflect how it shows up in GloWBE. The blue-bold indicates that those numbers showed up in the darkest blue in the GloWBE search results, like the GB column here:

(The Canadian numbers are distracting—they're not based on as much text as GB and US.)

The darker the blue on GloWBE, the more a phrase is associated with a particular country. So, it's not just that the of versions are found in BrE—it could be said (if we want to be a bit hyperbolic) that they are BrE, as opposed to AmE.

In both countries, the 've version is used more than the misspelling. Nevertheless, the American numbers were darkest blue for these spellings—indicating the correct spellings are more "American" in some way—though note that the British 've versions are just one shade of blue lighter—the difference is not as stark as in the previous table.

The moral of this story  

It looks like the BBC complainers and the Telegraph writer assumed MODAL+of was an Americanism because they disapprove of it. But remember, kids:

Not liking something is not enough to make it an Americanism.


Coulda, shoulda, woulda

When I discovered these facts, I immediately tweeted the would of (etc.) table to the world, and one correspondent asked if the American way of misspelling would've isn't woulda. The answer is: no, not really. Americans might spell it that way if they're trying to mimic a particular accent or very casual speech (I coulda been a contenda!). It's like when people spell God as Gawd—not because they think that's how to spell an almighty name, but because they're trying to represent a certain pronunciation of it. No one accidentally writes theological texts with Gawd in them. But people do write would of in formal text 'accidentally'—because they don't know better, not because they're trying to represent someone's non-standard pronunciation. In the Corpus of Contemporary American English, 75% of the instances of coulda occur in the Fiction sub-corpus; authors use it when they're writing dialog(ue) to make it sound authentic. 

But you do get coulda, shoulda and woulda in an AmE expression, which accounts for about 10% of the coulda data. I think of it as shoulda, coulda, woulda, but there does seem to be some disagreement about the order of the parts:

The phrase can be used to mean something like "I (or you, etc.) could have done it, should have done it, would have done it—but I didn't, so maybe I shouldn't worry about it too much now". (A distant relative of the BrE use of never mind.) Sometimes it's used to accuse someone of not putting in enough effort—all talk, no action. 

The English singer Beverley Knight had a UK top-ten single called Shoulda Woulda Coulda, which  may have had a hand in populari{s/z}ing the phrase in BrE (though it's still primarily used in the US).

Another shoulda that's coming up in the GloWBE data is If you like it then you shoulda put a ring on it. And I can't hear that now without thinking of Stephen Merchant, so on this note, good night!



—————

Postscript, 5 Feb 2016: @49suns pointed out that I haven't weeded out possible noise from things like She could of course play the harmonica. Good point. British people do write could of course (etc) more than Americans do because they use commas less. Americans would be more likely to write could, of course, play the harmonica—and with the commas it wouldn't be caught by the search software. As well as of course, there's of necessity and other things 'noising up' the data.

I'm not going to re-do all the tables because I've posted this now and many have commented on it.  But the good news (for this post) is that the conclusions about of is pretty much the same if we limit the search to modal + of + verb; it's still more frequently British—especially when preceding been, the case that was complained about in The Telegraph. Here's a sample.


An interesting case at the bottom is should of known, which reverses the pattern. This is just because should [have] known—often in should [have] known better—is a much more common phrase in AmE than in BrE. Searching should * known, we get:



Looking more closely at that group, I found that 6 of the 21 American should of knowns were from song lyrics (none of the UK ones were), and one was using it as an example in telling people that they shouldn't write should of

The online interface doesn't like me searching for modal+of+verb, so I've had to search for *ould+of+verb, leaving out might and in the post I also left out must.  But having re-searched those, I can tell you: still dark blue in British, not in American.

The other thing I haven't done, which someone (or someones) else has suggested is what happens after negation. That is a lot more complicated, since there are more variations to consider (since both the n't and the have can be contracted).  I'm really interested in that, so I'm going to write a separate post on it next week. Till then!


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contracted have

Months ago (I am a bad blogger), Brett wrote to ask:
Can you enlighten me any further on the differences between interpretations of "It's gone" in NA & the UK?
(You can probably tell from the NA [=North America] that Brett is writing from Canada.) Brett covers this issue on his English, Jack blog, where he writes:

I was somewhat taken aback recently when a disucssion on the ETJ mailing list brought to light the different interpretations of the 's in "Where's my car? It's gone." It turns out that most North American speakers of English interpret this as "My car is gone?" while British speakers tend to parse it as "My car has gone."
I suppose part of the reason I've taken so long to respond to Brett here is that I haven't much to add to his analysis. Or should I say: I've not got much? Or should I say: I haven't got much? or I've not much? At least part of the reason that BrE and AmE/CanE differ in their interpretations of 's as is or has is that BrE likes contracting the verb have more than AmE (and presumably CanE) does.

John Algeo, in his book British or American English?, reports that contracted have ('ve) is more common in BrE--about 1.5 times more frequent in BrE overall, but more than 5 times more frequent in BrE when used as a main verb, rather than an auxiliary verb. (Which is just part of the reason that I am annoyed that many people stereotype AmE as contracting more than BrE. If you claim it, back it up, and use some subtlety in your analysis, please!) So, while contractions of the type in (1) the most common uses of 've in both dialects, (2) is much more likely to be found in BrE than in AmE:
(1) I've been thinking. (have = auxiliary verb, expressing tense/aspect)
(2) I've a secret (have = main verb, meaning 'possess')
When have occurs between a subject pronoun and a not, the speaker has a choice--to contract the have with the pronoun (I've not gargled, she's not gargled) or to contract the not (I haven't gargled, she hasn't gargled). In both BrE and AmE, it is more common to contract the not. But the I've/she's not pattern is much more likely to be heard in BrE than in AmE; in Algeo's words the 've/'d not pattern is a "statistical Briticism". In the Cambridge International Corpus, he found for auxiliary have:
BrE: I haven't VERBed is 2.5 times more frequent than I've not VERBed
AmE: I haven't VERBed is 26 times more common than I've not VERBed
The contracted have is less common still in the past tense, but the BrE/AmE difference is more stark:
BrE: I hadn't VERBed is 20 times more frequent than I'd not VERBed
AmE: I hadn't VERBed is nearly 140 times more common than I'd not VERBed
Because BrE has an easier time allowing the contraction of main verb have, it is much more likely to allow negated contracted have as a main verb. However, it is more common in both dialects to insert a do and contract that to the not.
BrE: I don't have any NOUN is 10 times more frequent than I haven't any NOUN.
AmE: I don't have any NOUN is 60 times more frequent than I haven't any NOUN.

BrE: I don't have a NOUN is 6 times more frequent than I haven't a NOUN.
AmE: I don't have a NOUN is 55 times more frequent than I haven't a NOUN.
While writing this blog over the past few months, I've been vaguely aware that while I mark many variant spellings/words as I write, I don't mark my contractions as AmE or BrE. Since the favo(u)red forms are the same in both dialects, I suppose I can (retroactively) justify that lack of dialect-marking. But I've also been aware that I do type (and say) things like I've not (like here and here and here and more places) and they've not (here) and you've not (here), and I have the feeling that that's one area in which I've Britified myself a bit. Or bitified myself a Brit, possibly.

And while I know the comments will probably go all over the place even if I do say the following... If you'd like to discuss contractions involving other verbs, please send an e-mail rather than writing a comment. I will get to other contracted verbs at some point, but don't want to do so in the comments section!
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Abbr.

AmE = American English
BrE = British English
OED = Oxford English Dictionary (online)