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Part of
The Perfect Volume: Papers on the perfect
Edited by Kristin Melum Eide and Marc Fryd
[Studies in Language Companion Series 217] 2021
► pp. 397–438

Chapter 16
From have-omission to supercompounds

A wealth of English perfects

| University of Poitiers

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.

Keywords: counterfactual, have-less, have-omission, horror aequi, irrealis, modal pluperfect, prescriptivism, supercompound, tense-copying
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 1. Have-less non-finite Perfect constructions
  • 2.From the modal pluperfect to supercompound perfects
  • 3.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 July 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.217.16fry
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