Tuco
Junior Member
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2010
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- English
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In post #6 you wrote, “Regardless, there are only a couple ways to take my comment. You either omit "have" or "got" and the results are obvious”. (My underlining.)
In post #8 you wrote, “It's like saying, "There's a couple people I want you to meet." If teachers want to teach that as acceptable, I'm just glad I'm out of school”.
That’s fine by me, though it strikes me as a little strange that you should feel uncomfortable about a usage that appears in your own writing.
It is the difference between "There is" and "There are." I'm not really being inconsistent.
I think this is contradictory to your comment:In some contexts the present perfect of GET has come to have the same meaning as the present simple of HAVE.
'Got', on its own, means nothing in 'have got'. 'Have got' has the same meaning as 'have'.
Am I wrong?
- To have current possession of. Used in the present perfect form with the meaning of the present: We've got plenty of cash.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
I feel if the present perfect form is used with the meaning of the present, the wrong tense was used. I mean, if the tense were used properly, you wouldn't have to explain it in the context of another tense--you would simply explain the tense and how that tense is used.
The idiom have got historically derives from a perfect construction. This is transparent in BeE, where got is the past participle of get. [...] Have gotis restricted to informal style, but is otherwise very common, especially in BrE.
Huddleston, Rodney & Pullum, Geoffrey K (2002.112) The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Cambridge: CUP
Thanks for the quote. Why do you feel Have got is restricted to informal style? If it is grammatically correct, wouldn't it be perfectly acceptable at all levels of style?
This quote says that have got is an idiom. Isn't this an indication that it isn't grammatically correct?
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