Social work and linguistic systems: Marking possession in Canadian English

Abstract

A B S T R A C TThe system of stative possession has been subject to variation and change since at least the Early Modern period, with have got rising in frequency in British and Antipodean varieties of English. In Canadian English, as represented by data from the largest city, Toronto, have predominates. Nonetheless, the full set of constraints previously reported for this variable are operative, corroborating the longitudinal maintenance of linguistic factors across time and space (Kroch, 1989). At the same time, variation among possessive forms is conditioned by robust sociolinguistic patterns.Have is correlated with education and with female speakers, whereas less-educated men favor have got and got. Such findings demonstrate that the domination of one form or another in a variable system can be the result of historical accident, in this case a founder effect at a particular point in history, and that the social value of forms is a product of local circumstances at the time of change.

Form does not follow function, but variation does: the origin and early usage of possessive havegot in English

“…Table 4 provides an overview of the conditioning factors found by these studies. They have shown, firstly, that there are differences between varieties, have got being more common in British and New Zealand English than in the North American varieties (Tagliamonte et al 2010;Quinn 2004), and secondly that the variation is in part socially conditioned, such that 'less educated men favor have got or got' (in Toronto English, Tagliamonte et al 2010: 149). 6 As for semantic functions, the possessor (i.e.…”

“…If possessive have got has not emerged through a functional need, the question that remains is how form and function play out once have got is established as an expression of stative possession and thus an alternative variant to bare have . In Present- day English, this variation has been investigated in various settings (Noble 1985 – as cited in Kroch 1989; Tagliamonte 2003; Quinn 2004; Tagliamonte et al 2010). Table 4 provides an overview of the conditioning factors found by these studies.…”

“The Geordie accent has a bit of a bad reputation”: internal and external constraints on stative possession in the Tyneside English of the 21st century

“…The subject of stative possession has generated much interest over the past decade, particularly regarding the origin of the construction have got and its use in different varieties of British and North American English (e.g. Tagliamonte, 2003, 2013; Jankowski 2005; Tagliamonte et al , 2010). In these varieties, have got alternates with have to mark possession in sentences such as those in (1) below.…”

“…In addition to such internal linguistic explanations put forward to account for the development of have got versus have over the past three centuries, social factors have also been implicated in governing the usage of these variants. It has been argued, for example, that have has become more favoured in North American English than in British English because of the long prescriptive tradition of stigmatizing have got in North America (Tagliamonte et al , 2010: 161–2). Differences in the frequency of occurrence of have as opposed to have got have also been ascribed to factors such as age, gender, class and/or education (see section 3.2 below).…”

“…The paper will follow a similar methodology to that adopted in the quantitative variationist studies of Tagliamonte (2003, 2013) and Tagliamonte et al (2010). Specifically, our study will focus on examining the phenomenon from a diachronic perspective, comparing our findings with those of Yoshizumi (2008), which examines two earlier sub-corpora of DECTE from the 1960s/70s and early 1990s, in order to track the development of have got over a longer period of time (see section 4.1 for details).…”