Re: CHAT: Nonstandard usage (was Natural language change (wasRe:Charlie and I))

----- Original Message -----
From: Thomas R. Wier <artabanos@...>
To: Multiple recipients of list CONLANG <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 1999 1:45 PM
Subject: Re: CHAT: Nonstandard usage (was Natural language change
(wasRe:Charlie and I))


I do a similar thing for "to have got to" (meaning "must").  Usually,
it comes out as:

I gotta, you gotta, he's gotta, we gotta, y'all gotta, they gotta.

I can forsee a time when "gotta" will become completely
grammaticalized, losing the "'s" in the third person singular.

<<<<<

I forgot about <gotta>... I'm not sure, but I think I only use that in th=
e
first and second persons usually, and then in a jocular sense. I would
otherwise say <-'ve got to> or <have/has to>.

>>>>>
> See, this one sounds clearly wrong to me.  I wonder why I've managed to
> keep the distinction, but only in "to be"...?  Are there other language=
s
> out there where some tense or mood or such is only used for certain
> verbs, leaving the other ones to drop into a different tense?
Can't think of any off hand.  There seem to be lots, though,
where tenses begin losing aspectual information. In German,
you pretty much have to use the simple past,
<war> "was" instead of the perfect <ist gewesen> "have been"
(they're identical in meaning anyways, so it's not much of a loss).
All verbs that can be helping verbs (haben, sein, werden) work
like this, while all other verbs have to use the perfect in the
spoken language.

Ancient Greek had something similar: lots of verbs which were
morphologically present in form, but semantically perfect or some
other tense in meaning:

oikhomai =3D I have gone
h=EAk=F4 =3D I have come
dramoumai =3D I will run
etc.

<<<<<

I think <kaan>, the word for "am/are/is not" in Arabic, is morphologicall=
y
perfect but used in an imperfect sense.

>>>>>
It looks like we're getting something like this in English:

to have got =3D to have
(Incidentally, for all English speakers:  I don't know of any American
who'd use "I've gotten" synonymously for "I have")

<<<<<

Speaking of <to have got> and grammaticalization, many American children =
(at
least where I live) use <got> as if it were a simple present tense verb
synonymous with "have": I got, you got, he gots, she gots, we got, they g=
ot.

How do we classify <got> and <gotten> anyway? They obviously have differe=
nt
usages in American English; is it possible they are both past participles=
?
Maybe <gotten> is the start of a whole new category :)