Subject: summary : whatever happened to 'd ?

a few weeks ago i posted a query to the list regarding the disappearance of had or its contracted form ' d , in such expressions as she better stop , which appeared in a recent academic publication . i questioned people 's attitudes towards the standardisation of this new form ( better ) , the subsequent status of the bare infinitive ( stop ) , the possibility of its association with the extraposed construction it is better that she stop , ( implying a subjunctive analysis of stop ) and the likelihood of substituting another adjective ( e . g . good ) in place of better has a result of this . i also questioned the possibility of inverting better with the subject in interrogatives , given the analysis of it as an auxiliary form . i received 26 replies , and i would like to thank the following people who sent their comments , and anyone who is yet to do so : tamara al - kasey ; eleanor olds batchelder ; jonathon berg ; claudia brugman ; marsha bundman ; ellen contini - morava ; max copperman ; john cowan ( logical language group ) david fertig ; frederik fouvry ; dorine houston ; marge jackman ; roger lass ; deborah d . kela ruuskanen ; james kirchner ; timothy miller ; catherine rudin ; raphael salkie ; alena sanusi ; hal schiffman ; jane simpson ; dan slobin ; frits stuurman ; larry trask ; ivan uemlianen ; max wheeler . of 18 replies to the question of standardisation , 9 replied that it was not to be considered standard , 9 thought that it was either normal , informal or ok , and 8 did not consider this question . nobody liked the analysis of stop as a subjunctive , 2 people considering that the extraposed derivation sounded educated or stilted . one reply considered that stop was an imperative form . four people replied that better was an auxiliary , 7 thought it was a modal or semi-modal , and 2 thought that the construction was simply idiomatic . john cowan made mention of the use of better in yiddish - influenced american english as a sentence prefix : ' better she should n't go ' . with regard to its inversion in interrogatives , 9 people considered sai was not ok , one person thought it ok to invert in tags , and only one person thought main clause sai sounded ok . i also want to thank frederik fouvry for his reference : " information based syntax and semantics " ( hpsg vol . 1 , pollard & sag , 1987 ) in which better is analysed as an auxiliary that does n't allow inversion ; and frits stuurman for his references and comments : in g . gazdar , g . pullum , & i . sag ( 1982 ) " auxiliaries and related phenomena in a restricted theory of phrase structure " _ language _ 59 , 3 : 591-638 , pp . 610-611 , there is a reference to aren ' t as a similar case ( aren ' t i vs . i aren ' t ) ; and in gazdar , e . klein , pullum & sag ( 1985 ) _ generalized phrase structure grammar _ ( cambridge , mass . : harvard up ) , p . 64 , and gazdar , pullum & sag ( 1982 ) , p . 611 , footnote 17 , there are references to different meanings of modals like shall and might when inverted for interrogatives . frits stuurman also cites a gpsg reference to the use of better in p . sells ( 1985 ) _ lectures on government - binding theory , generalized phrase structure grammar , and lexical - functional grammar _ ( stanford : csli ) , p . 93 . many people found analogies with other modals that do not invert , e . g . claudia brugman mentions the difficulty of inverting ' she has to stop ' ) * ' has she to stop ? ' and gotta is equally impossible to invert . james kirchner also mentions otta as a similar case . tamara al - kasey compares the negative and the affirmative interrogatives : * ' had she better stop ? ' and ' had n't she better stop ? ' suggesting that the latter is more acceptable . other interesting items were : the vp - deletion version , observed by max wheeler ' we better had ' ; and at least 2 people considered that had seems to return only for inversion for interrogatives . generally , the use of inversion of better + subject was considered more common in tags , especially amongst children or teenagers , and jane simpson thinks that the tag bettern ' t you is now appearing in australian english , with or without the preceding ' d . ivan uemlianen ( british speaker from northern england ) claims he had always used the tag ' bettern ' t i ? ' as a child , which had always struck him as not quite right , and had never heard of the had until he heard it being used in old films . dan slobin considers the use of had to be archaic , or from another variety or era , although the inversion ' better she go ? ' does not appear in the speech of american - english preschoolers in their data . one respondent did n't know where the had came from , and another reanalysed it as would , in the same way as it has been reanalysed in conditional protases . another suggestion was that it was analogous to a pluperfect auxiliary without tense . two replied that the expression she better stop was just an example of sloppy editing . there was little discussion of phonological processes , but , in particular , i found interesting the following comments by roger lass : " in my dialect anyhow ( new york city middle class ) , it 's certainly normal to say ( and sometimes , in less formal registers , to write ) , i better , you better , he better , we better , they better . . . observe though : all the pronouns end with a vowel , and there are alternative forms , e . g . i 'd better . . . though these are much less common . there is however another type , which is sometimes taken to be better but is n't : you [ b ] better , where there 's a sort of geminate or at least half-long consonant . the very fact that none of the syntactic things you mark with * or ? seem to occur would be an indication that there has not really been any kind of reanalysis , but rather an institutionalization of a fast-speech deletion and / or assimilation , which is creeping up into slower styles ( as often happens ) . in fact the construction itself is weird anyhow , since you had comparative does n't seem to exist , except in archaisms like ' i 'd liefer do that ' ( i can't use it , but i ' ve heard it ) . note also , it 's just occurred to me , that you do n't get deletion of - 'd in * i rather do that . . . " this last comment i think gives us plenty of scope for more discussion . debbie ziegeler
