Oct 14, 2026, 2:59 AM#GrammaticalityJudgement time!
#English speakers - I'm listening to a person in the media, she's about 35yo, white female from Wyoming, and she reliably produces this structure:
"What could've I done?"
"Where should've she gone?"
I think I would have to say:
"What could I have done?"
"Where should she have gone?"
and I don't think I can contract the 'have'
is this structure (a) grammatical/natural sounding for you? and/or (b) is it familiar?
Thanks for any thoughts!
Oct 14, 2026, 3:01 AM@linguistics it's funny because the more I see it/say it, the more I can convince myself it's not at all unusual, but I think it's unusual. Is it?
Oct 14, 2026, 3:05 AM@amyfou @linguistics I think it’s unusual but completely comprehensible. Like it wouldn’t come out of my mouth that way, but hearing it, my brain would understand with no perceptible lag.
Oct 14, 2026, 3:09 AMboth 'what could have I done' and 'what could I have done' are attested in google ngrams, with the latter much less frequent than the former, but it's clearly available even without contraction of 'have' to at least some English speakers
Oct 14, 2026, 3:12 AM@Moss same here! thank you!
That's my neck of the woods, and that's just not normal.
Oct 14, 2026, 3:11 AM@loosenut lol thanks for the reality check!
@amyfou Reversing order is pretty normal in English, the object relations still resolve fine... For me this is legal and rather attractively quaint..
@amyfou Like, "Done what could've I?" and "Have gone where should she?" would be difficult to grasp but technically legal to me..
Oct 14, 2026, 3:53 AM@snowyfox excellent thank you!
Oct 14, 2026, 3:31 AM@amyfou It's not grammatically correct, but then again, Americans don't know the first thing about grammar and seeing the level of education over there, nothing surprises me anymore.
Now, if they say it, I guess they say it.
Oct 14, 2026, 3:53 AM@David we say all kinds of weird.
Thank you!
Oct 14, 2026, 3:37 AM@amyfou
It wouldn’t occur to me to contract it in writing, but when speaking it would come out closer to “what could I [əv] done?” Your media person’s pattern would be seamlessly understood but it would still feel uncanny enough to elicit a pupper-like head tilt.
Caveat: English isn’t my first language but I acquired it young enough that it’s rarely clocked as ESL.
Oct 14, 2026, 3:54 AM@TheHag thank you that also sounds right to me!
(wouldn't know you're ESL at all, exactly as you note)
thank you!
@amyfou I’m an Australian. The Wyoming woman’s sentences are not how I’d expect to hear it, but they do sound like the same class of “error” where some people say “brang” instead of “brought” or suchlike… like to me it is plausible that a native speaker would say this, they just don’t share my same dialect (or idiolect, or whatever).
As for the part about contraction, I’m pretty sure I would contract the “have” to [əv], but not all the way to just [v] at the end of the pronoun. The [h] is definitely gone though.
Oct 14, 2026, 3:55 AM@jayeless that makes sense, Jessica - thank you!
It doesn't sound grammatical, natural or familiar to me!
Oct 14, 2026, 5:14 AM@LibraryFinch thank you!
@amyfou
It's less common but not unusual, in my experience
That said, I have to train my spellcheck to accept a 've attachment
@linguistics
Oct 14, 2026, 5:14 AM@DelilahTech thank you!
@amyfou As a (non linguist) Scottish English speaker who studied in London and lives abroad, I would use the “I have done” structure but would omit the ‘h’ in unstressed ‘have’, something like ‘ɪv’.
Oct 14, 2026, 9:41 AM@amyfou @linguistics
That's just wrong.
@amyfou @linguistics It’s ungrammatical. And unambiguous and unfamiliar to me.
@amyfou @linguistics Weird and ungrammatical.
@amyfou @linguistics As others have said, my brain could process it if I heard it. To my mind, it is how some people talk when their brain gets ahead of their mouths.
Oct 14, 2026, 2:29 PM@amyfou Fascinating examples! I don't remember ever hearing anything like that.
My interpretation is that she's chunked these frequent tense-modal auxiliaries together into one, so that she now treats it as a unit when inverting subject and verb...
@amyfou Not an English-speaker, but I had to read it slowly to figure out what was remarkable about it... But they would work fine without the modal verb, so maybe there's some kind of procedure behind it to the effect of "place modal verb before 've".