Possessive have (got) in Australian English in the 20th century

Previous research has revealed differences in the usage patterns of stative possessive have (got) in varieties of English. While British English and New Zealand English are moving towards more use of have got (I have got a cat), the North American varieties of English show an increase in the use of simple have (I have a cat) to express possession or ownership and similar relations (e.g., Biber et al., 1999; Jankowski, 2005; Quinn, 2004, 2009; Tagliamonte, 2003; Tagliamonte et al., 2010). In terms of Australian English, previous research has shown that the use of possessive have (got) varies according to speaker age (with a stronger preference for have by the young), but also that different materials (sociolinguistic interviews vs. talkback radio shows) may provide differing results (Korhonen, 2016, 2017).

The present paper takes a diachronic perspective and examines how the use of possessive have (got) has varied and changed in Australian English in the course of the 20th century. The study is based on material from the Australian Diachronic Hansard Corpus (Kruger & Smith, 2018) and a sample of transcribed audio recordings of parliamentary discourse from the same period. While the study shows a slight increase in the use of the innovative have got in the written Hansard records towards the latter part of the time period, it also raises the question of possible editorial intervention that may have been exercised in the case of a feature (i.e., have got) that has been described as being "good colloquial but not good literary English” (Fowler, 1937). Thus, the examination of the actual audio recordings allows for the diachronic changes in the use of possessive have (got) in Australian English to be investigated in more detail.

References

Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. & Finegan, E. (1999). The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.

Fowler, H.W. (1937). A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jankowski, B. (2005). “We’ve got our own little ways of doing things here”: Cross-variety variation, change and divergence in the English stative possessive. Paper presented at the Twelfth International Conference in Methods in Dialectology, August 1-5, Moncton, Canada.

Korhonen, M. (2016). Possessive have (got) in Australian English. Paper presented at ICAME37, 25.-29.5.2016, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.

Korhonen, M. (2017). Perspectives on the Americanisation of Australian English: A Sociolinguistic Study. Helsinki: Unigrafia. https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/197729/PERSPECT.pdf

Kruger, H. and Smith, A. (2018). Colloquialization and densification in Australian English: A multidimensional analysis of the Australian Diachronic Hansard Corpus. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 38(3), 293-328.

Quinn, H. (2004). Possessive have and (have) got in New Zealand English. Paper presented at NWAV 33, 1 October 2004, Ann Arbor.

Quinn, H. (2009). Downward reanalysis and the rise of stative HAVE got. In P. Crisma & G. Longobardi (Eds.), Historical Syntax and Linguistic Theory (pp. 212-230). Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.

Tagliamonte, S. (2003). ‘Every place has a different toll’: Determinants of grammatical variation in cross-variety perspective. In G. Rohdenburg & B. Mondorf (Eds.), Determinants of Grammatical Variation in English (pp. 531­­-554). New York/Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Tagliamonte, S., D’Arcy, A. & Jankowski, B. (2010). Social work and linguistic systems: Marking possession in Canadian English. Language Variation and Change, 22, 149­-173.