Possessive and Deontic ‘Have’ and ‘Have Got’: Evolution and Migration of forms within the Syntax of contemporary British English

The verb ‘have’, in all its various uses (auxiliary for perfect tenses, as a marker of possession, a pro-verb, a verbal substitute, a causative verb and as a deontic semi-modal), once functioned as an operator (see Halliday 1994), i.e. had NICE properties (Palmer 1988). Today, however different syntactic structures containing ‘have’ have evolved, such as ‘have’ auxiliary (“have you a …?” / “have you got a ….?); and ‘have’ as a lexical verb (“Do you have a …?”) and similarly (“Have you got to …?” and “Do you have to …?” but not *“Have you to …?”). In the case of “do … have” structures, ‘have’ has become an unmarked lexical verb requiring “dummy ‘do’”, and, in “have got” structures, the present perfect form of the verb ‘get’ has been seconded in to express the process of possession. Such developments constitute migration both at the level of forms from one speech community to another (“have got” being generally BrE, “do have” USE – see Crystal 1995) and at the syntactic level as the verb ‘have’ can be seen to be leaving its original position within the structure of the language - that of joint auxiliary / lexical verb (a role now performed exclusively by ‘be’) - to occupy new spaces as either auxiliary or lexical verb but no longer both at once. In this article we examine this situation from a syntactic context. Among other data, a corpus of spoken discourse taken from a popular radio show (Just A Minute) covering a 40 year period from 1967 to 2006, will be analysed to provide specific examples of various uses and structures and also to describe the relative frequency of various forms both between speakers and over time. We will also examine whether speakers are consistent in their use of one form rather than another or whether they mix forms. Describing actual use of these and associated forms is a complex matter that over the years has attracted the attention of noted scholars including Johnson (1755), Fowler (1965) and Gowers (1954), although the matter today tends to be treated only in pedagogical grammars. It remains an important area for research as the situation appears to be in a state of flux with certain forms used more as positives than they are as either negatives or interrogatives. There is also migration of a more overt kind with the gradual emergence of a hybrid form ‘got’ (without ‘have’), which is presumably the beginnings of an entirely new verb (‘to got’ cf: “don’t got”) independent from ‘to get’ whose origins are colloquial US English.