Dialects haven’t got to be the same: Modal microvariation in English. Stockwell, R. & Carson, S. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 4(31):1–15.
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This paper concerns itself with dialectal differences between British Eng-lish (BrE) and American English (AmE) regarding modal have-got and its scope with respect to sentential negation. Modal haven’t-got is perfectly acceptable in BrE, meaning ‘not obligated to’ in the standard variety. In AmE, modal have-got is some-what degraded when the have has unambiguously raised, and especially so when it is negated, as shown in a preliminary acceptability judgement survey of American Eng-lish speakers. An analysis in terms of polarity sensitivity is inadequate, and Iatridou & Zeijlstra’s (2013) syntax for modals is overly restrictive in the face of scopally ambiguous have not (got) to in non-standard varieties of BrE. We propose an analy-sis in terms of the locus of modality: whereas have and got are separate in BrE, in AmE have-got is a scopally indivisible whole. Finally, we evaluate how well this analysis extends to an additional dialectal difference in verb phrase ellipsis (LeSourd 1976), where the have of have-got survives ellipsis in BrE but not AmE.
@article{stockwell_richard_dialects_nodate,
	title = {Dialects haven’t got to be the same: {Modal} microvariation in {English}},
	volume = {4},
	doi = {https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v4i1.4538},
	abstract = {This paper concerns itself with dialectal differences between British Eng-lish (BrE) and American English (AmE) regarding modal have-got and its scope with respect to sentential negation. Modal haven’t-got is perfectly acceptable in BrE, meaning ‘not obligated to’ in the standard variety. In AmE, modal have-got is some-what degraded when the have has unambiguously raised, and especially so when it is negated, as shown in a preliminary acceptability judgement survey of American Eng-lish speakers. An analysis in terms of polarity sensitivity is inadequate, and Iatridou \& Zeijlstra’s (2013) syntax for modals is overly restrictive in the face of scopally ambiguous have not (got) to in non-standard varieties of BrE. We propose an analy-sis in terms of the locus of modality: whereas have and got are separate in BrE, in AmE have-got is a scopally indivisible whole. Finally, we evaluate how well this analysis extends to an additional dialectal difference in verb phrase ellipsis (LeSourd 1976), where the have of have-got survives ellipsis in BrE but not AmE.},
	number = {31},
	journal = {Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America},
	author = {Stockwell, Richard, Carson, Schütze},
	keywords = {have got, haven't got},
	pages = {1--15}
}

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