From have-omission to supercompounds
Résumé
This paper adopts an historical perspective to shed light on syntactic patterns exhibiting have-omission or have-doubling in a language – English – where the forms in question have gone largely unreported over the centuries, or have tended to be discarded as ‘non-standard’ by prescriptive grammarians. At least one subtype of supercompounds investigated here is reported for the first time in this paper. Explanations for the attested patterns involve e.g. prescriptivism, a universal tendency to avoid the (near-) adjacency of identical grammatical structures, and the normative pressure to ban several occurrences of have. In a comparison with cognate structures in closely related languages, semantic traits of these constructions are identified, e.g. irrealis (have-omission), resultative, and experiential (supercompounds). Nevertheless, a remainder of the examples are not captured by these semantic descriptions, but possibly result from functional overlap between modal and perfect constructions, or “copying” of morphosyntactic features across constructions in a discourse.