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Have went – an American usage problem1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2015

INGRID TIEKEN-BOON VAN OSTADE  and
VIKTORIJA KOSTADINOVA
INGRID TIEKEN-BOON VAN OSTADE
Affiliation:
Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, University of Leiden, Postbus 9515, 2300 RA Leiden, The [email protected]; [email protected]
VIKTORIJA KOSTADINOVA
Affiliation:
Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, University of Leiden, Postbus 9515, 2300 RA Leiden, The [email protected]; [email protected]
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Abstract

Have went may seem a straightforward non-standard grammatical form today, but it evidently has a different status in British and American English. While in British English it developed into a non-standard form after the codification of the strong verb system by the eighteenth-century normative grammarians, in American English it became a usage problem. This we concluded from its appearance primarily in usage guides published in the United States over the years. The current status of the variant in the region was confirmed by evidence we encountered both in anonymous surveys and in face-to-face interviews with native speakers of American English. Our findings for the differences in status of have went in the course of its history were supported by corpus-based analyses of historical and modern text corpora for British and American English, while a close analysis of selected modern instances of have went and have gone showed a different distribution between the two that appears to warrant a perceived difference in meaning noted by some of the American informants.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 19 , Special Issue 2: Sense of place in the history of English , July 2015 , pp. 293 - 312
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

1

This article was written in the context of the research project Bridging the Unbridgeable: Linguists, Prescriptivists and the General Public, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and directed by Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade. We are grateful to the editors and an anonymous referee for their comments on an earlier version of this article.

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