Re: Have Had, Had Have (Was Re: Posting limits)

David P:
> Tristan wrote:
> <<(If Philip had've said 'Rhode Island', I would've had no trouble,>>
> I'm not sure if you realized you wrote this, or if it was an accident,
> but you just gave me some evidence of something I say exists, but
> no one in the department believes exist: Using *two* modal "have"'s.
> I do it often when I say something like, "I would've had to've had eaten".
Well observed. You can point out to people in your department (Berkeley,
isn't it? Surely they should know better! Hopefully at least the
people in Tom Wier's department would know better) that McCawley,
peace be upon him & his blessed memory, discusses this in _The
syntactic phenomena of English_ & constructs an ingenious argument
about the auxiliary _have_ being an expression of past tense (the
grammatical feature, not merely the semantic notion). (The details
escape me, what with syntax being a young person's game & me no
longer young.)

--And.

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