Re: "Could of" (Was: Be and Have in Arabic, English and German)

John Atkinson wrote: 
Lukas Pietsch wrote ...


If there were any examples anywhere else in English grammar that (1) a preposition could follow a modal; (2) a preposition could govern a VP;
and/or (3) anything else but "have" could mark perfect aspect/tense, or (4) I heard people actually exlaim, "he didn't, but he should of!" with a stressed, non-schwa final "of", then okay, I might accept the reanalysis story. But up to now, I've never seen any evidence of that kind.

Thanks to all who responded to my musings about "could of" so far. So, the picture that emerges is:

Several native speakers seem to have strong intuitions that [@v] in this phrase *is* indeed a form of a lexeme "of". Well, this brings us to the question of what the meaning of "is" is, I guess :-)

Two posters reported on the existence of strong [Av] pronunciations. I've still never consciously heard any such occurrence myself, but I guess I'll have to accept their testimony, and I said earlier that I would accept such a fact as evidence that something is indeed going on here. But what?

John says that, even if [@v] is "of", it needn't be the *preposition* "of". So, we'd have a new word, homophonous with the preposition "of", but of rather unclear grammatical status. On the other hand, one poster suggested, from introspection, that an analogy with adverbial modifer phrases like "sort of" may have played a role here.

I have a vague feeling that this issue, if it is real, may have some very interesting implications for linguistic theory. I mean, how could analogical re-analyses like this ever occur, and what do they tell us about the way grammatical knowledge is represented in our minds? If you think of grammar as a mechanism of abstract, formal computation, where composite meanings are computed from the arrangements of the parts of a construction, through rules that are represented in the most parsimonious way possible, then no speaker should *ever* be tempted to misunderstand the structure of a phrase like "should have gone" - it's just compositionally far too regular, and the parallelity with other phrases like "has gone", "seems to have gone", "having gone" etc. is too clear.

The suggestion of a local reanalysis of just this one set of strings modal+[@v]+Participle implies that this set of strings must have been represented in speaker's minds as a storage unit independently from other "have"+Verb collocations, although its composite meaning would have been computable from its smaller parts in a regular way, and thus its separate representation would have been redundant within the grammar. Moreover, it implies that phonological similarities between grammatically widely divergent phrases (such as "would @v gone" and "sort @v cool") are a structuring principle in our representations of grammatical knowledge, and that at some level these phrases form a common class of constructions. I can perhaps see how such a thing might be handled in a usage-based, emergentist theory of grammatical knowledge, but it sure wouldn't be easy to state within a more formalist model of syntax. Does anybody know if formalist syntacticians have ever dealt with this construction?

Sorry for these rather long and unstructured musings. This is all just off the top of my head.

By the way, could it be that "you had better go" is a similar case? I remember I once read it was historically a re-analysis from "should better go" > "'d better go" > "had better go"; so again, a contraction was re-analysed to the "wrong" strong form, and again in a syntactic slot where the new form wouldn't seem to fit categorically ("had" ought not to be taking infinitive complements.)

BTW, there are, I believe, American varieties which which forms like "gonna", "coulda", etc, are standard, and where the forms they derive from, "going to", "could have", etc, are not normally used, if at all. Since I don't speak such a variety, I have no intuition concerning whether these are separate lexemes. What's your take on these?

For some reason, I have less of a problem with cases where two words just fuse into one new word, which then must be assigned a new category. The weird thing is that people still seem to feel that "would @v" is *two* words, and that the second of these words is actually on some level identical to another word that is elsewhere used with an entirely different grammatical function.

Yet another thing: Historically, there seem to have been other reanalysis patterns of perfect "have" phrase too. In 18th-century texts, we get reduction to "of", to "a", and to zero, and we get them not only following modals but also following infinitive "to":

zero:
"you would been married"
"she could rendered her a little comfort"
"if it had been his will to called me"
"should it pleased God"

a:
"you would a wrote"
"I was determined to a gone home"
"thy would ahad me to agon wher we might alived hapley" ("they would have had me to have gone where we might have lived happily")

of:
"I would of gone long before this"


Lukas
.

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