Yorick Wilks asks:
>> Has anyone worked out how recent the "If..would have had.." form is?
I'm not familiar with the academic literature on this, so my .02 worth comes as anecdotal evidence from a native speaker of American English. My wife and I have discussed this construction quite a bit over the past 5-10 years, have listened to our own kids and to their friends, and have asked our college-aged students (in several classes in Illinois and Utah) for their input as well.
Based on this anecdotal evidence, it seems that the "If..would have had.." form is much more common in younger speakers. My guess is that the biggest difference is between the pre-30 crowd (OK for them) vs. the post-40 group. My wife doesn't like it at all, while it doesn't sound too bad to me, and I probably even use it in (informal) speech. But then I'm not a prescriptivist...
Mark Davies
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Mark Davies
Assoc. Prof., Linguistics
Brigham Young University
(phone) 801-422-9168 / (fax) 801-422-0906
http://davies-linguistics.byu.edu
** Corpus design and use // Linguistic databases **
** Historical linguistics // Language variation **
** English, Spanish, and Portuguese **
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