The "Have Got" Construction

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This is the construction which is designed to account for the acceptable and unacceptable paraphrase relations seen in the following list.

• 1a. She has blue eyes.
• 1b. She's got blue eyes.
• 2a. I have to leave.
• 2b. I've got to leave.
• 3a. She has a baby every two years.
• 3b. *She's got a baby every two years.
• 4a. He has his hands in his pockets.
• 4b. He's got his hands in his pockets.
• 5a. She has me cut her hair.
• 5b. *She's got me cut her hair.
• 6a. He has them washing his car.
• 6b. He's got them washing his car.
• 7a. He had blue eyes.
• 7b. *He'd got blue eyes.
• 8a. I have seen them
• 8b. *I've got seen them.

The phenomenon of GOT-extension concerns several uses of the verb HAVE, hence it needs to leave its semantics and valence as a variables. The basic observations are these.

1. GOT-extension allows HAVE to be used as an auxiliary. One of the properties of the auxiliary HAVE is the possibility of contraction; that's the reason all the examples above have pronoun subjects. It's not quite so common to contract to 'VE or 'S after a phrasal subject. Other auxiliary properties are the ability to occur with negation (HAVEN'T) or in Inversion constructions ("Have you got it?").
2. GOT-extension is limited to present tense. Compare (1) above with (7).
3. GOT-extension is limited to stative meaning. Compare (2) with (3), and (5) with (6).
4. GOT-extension is not possible with the perfect auxiliary. Notice (8).
5. The word GOT has no meaning on its own. American English (which distinguishes this GOT from the past participle GOTTEN) makes it clear that it is not, synchronically, a form of, or a use of, the past participle of GET.

The ss|syn|head path in the upper left corner of the diagram tells us that the lexical verb identified in this construction is HAVE and that it is an auxiliary.

The ss|syn|head path in the smaller box at the bottom tells us that the input lexical item is a non-auxiliary (that is, is marked "aux -") verb HAVE.

The two ss|sem paths in the upper left corner and in the small box both lead to feature structures linked by the unification index #1. This tells us that the semantics of the GOT-extended HAVE is the same as that of the input HAVE, but also that it is limited to stative uses and to the present tense.

Now look at the valence description in the middle of the large box. This tells you that there is a theta-null subject (hence GOT-extended HAVE is a "raising" verb, as with other auxiliaries). The other argument is a "VP" headed by the word GOT. The path ss|syn|head tells us that this lexical head is the form GOT, classified as a verb, with null inflection. That means only that there's no particular reason to assign it any of the standard inflections. The path ss|syn|level leads to the information that this constituent is a VP ("srs -" = "subject requirement not satisfied").

Now notice that the valence of the input HAVE and the valence of the GOT are identical.

Commentary.

• By proposing that GOT is the verbal head of a VP complement of the auxiliary HAVE, rather than simply an addition to the valence of the input HAVE, we assign constituency to the phrase beginning with GOT. (Hence, "[have] [you] [got any]" rather than "[have] [you] [got] [any]", etc.), and we avoid the problem of specifying the position of this word in the VP.
• There are some uses of HAVE which can function either as a main verb or as an auxiliary. Thus, we have - in some people's speech, anyway - both "Have you anything to do?" and "Do you have anything to do?". This means that this 'possession' use of the verb will have to be represented as unspecified for auxiliarity. ("aux [ ]" rather than "aux +" or "aux -") This unspecified character of "aux" for this use makes it available for GOT- extension, thus allowing "Have you got anything to do?".
• What we know about auxiliary functions, negation, and GOT- extension predicts the acceptability of "You haven't got to do that", but at least some speakers regard that as ungrammatical, or at least strongly dispreferred.
• There remains the problem of what to do with the simple present- tense use of GOT without a supporting auxiliary, expecially since we apparently need to show that the simplest way of explaining it is in terms of the "deletion" of the contraction to [v]. Thus "I've got nothing to do" and "I got nothing to do" mean the same thing, but "He's got nothing to do" doesn't allow reduction to "*He got nothing to do." The fact that unsupported GOT is available for plural subjects and first and second person subjects, but not for third person singular, seems to show that [v]-deletion is possible, but [z]- deletion is not. How to say that in a constructionist formalism is a problem.