> Joe:
> > On Tuesday 04 March 2003 5:44 am, Nik Taylor wrote:
> > > Tim May wrote:
> > > > Your dialect won't allow "I've not" either?
> > >
> > > Nope. To me, that sounds English. I'm sure there are probably other
> > > dialects outside of England that do that, and probably dialects in
> > > England that don't, but "English" is the association I have when I hear
> > > a form like "I've not"
> >
> > Thing is, It's not English, I have never ever heard a person say 'I've
> > not' 'I have not' or 'I haven't' are the only two options I've heard,
> > outside of Victorian plays by Oscar Wilde or somesuch person
>
> I find it hard to imagine how someone can live in England, even if
> they've grown up in London, and think that "I've not" is not English
> English. It's not even restricted to the North. Searching the
> British National Corpus online:
>
>
http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/lookup.html
>
> finds 0 "I've not" and only 3 "I haven't" (100m words, of which
> 10m are spoken), so that doesn't prove much, but if you google
> for them you find that although "I haven't" is ten times more
> common globally, "I've not" is predominantly British.
>