this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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Why YSK?

The first person who typed "should of" probably heard of it in real life that was meant to be "should've", they typed "should of" online and readers thought that it's grammatically correct to say "should of" which is in fact wrong and it became widespread throughout the years on Reddit.

I hope something could start to change.

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[–] h34d@feddit.de 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

While it is true that "should of" etc. can easily originate from a confusion between "'ve'" and unstressed "of", which sound identical, the statement

"Should of" is incorrect

itself is at least a bit misleading and prescriptivist in its generality.

Interestingly, there seem to be at least some native English speakers who genuinely do say "should of" (with a stressed "of") sometimes. This paper for example argues that people who say "should of" really do use a grammatical construction of the form modal verb + of + past participle. One argument the author mentions is that this would also explain the words "woulda", "coulda" and "shoulda", since "of"->"a" is quite common in general (e.g. "kind of" -> "kinda"), but "'ve"->"a" basically doesn't occur elsewhere (e.g. no one says "I'a" or "you'a" instead of "I've" or "you've"). Another is that the reverse mistake, i.e. using "'ve'" in place of "of" (e.g. "kind've"), is much rarer, which is a clear difference to e.g. the situation with "they're"/"their"/"there", where people use these words in place of the others in all combinations frequently. I recommend this blog article for a much longer discussion.

Also, whether genuine mistake (which it almost certainly is in many cases, although probably not all) or different grammatical construction, YSK that "should of" etc. didn't just become popular recently, but have been used for centuries. E.g. John Keats wrote in a letter in 1814: "Had I known of your illness I should not of written in such fiery phrase in my first Letter.". Many more examples (some older as well) can be found e.g. here or here.

TL;DR: While in many cases "should of" etc. can well be a mistake, originating from the fact that it sounds identical to "should've" when unstressed, there is some interesting linguistic evidence that at least in some dialects of English native speakers really do say "should of" etc. (i.e. in those cases it is not a mistake, merely non-standard/dialectal).

[–] ronaldtemp1@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Isn't "have" either an auxiliary verb or verb and "of" a preposition?

Are these acceptable? If yes, why? If not, why not?

  • I of heard that story before.

  • Diane of already gone.

  • John ofn't phoned, of he?

  • I ofn't visited London before.

  • Of you seen Roz?

  • Of she been invited?

  • They still ofn't of any news when I spoke to them yesterday.

I don't know man, Oxford Dictionary (click Grammar Point to expand) says that https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/have_2

A common mistake is to write ‘could of’ instead of could have or could've

~~I could of told you that.~~

I could've told you that.

The reason for the mistake is that the pronunciation of ’ve is the same as that of of when it is not stressed. This is a common error but it is definitely considered wrong in standard English.

[–] h34d@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Isn't "have" either an auxiliary verb or verb and "of" a preposition?

Yes.

Are these acceptable? If yes, why? If not, why not?

No, because you constructed them by merely replacing the verb "have" by the preposition "of" in situations which have nothing to do with "of" after "should"/"would"/"could". I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, since neither I nor the people I cited ever claimed that this should work in the first place. The claim of in particular the author of the first paper I cited is that for some speakers there seems to be a novel construction modal verb + "of" + past participle, not that the preposition "of" has the same function as "have" in this case or in any other (in this case, the novel construction as a whole would have more or less, but not entirely the same function as modal verb + "have" + past participle, but "of" would still be just a preposition).

I don't know man, Oxford Dictionary (click Grammar Point to expand) says that [...] it is definitely considered wrong in standard English.

Yes, it certainly is considered wrong in standard English, but the interesting thing is that in some non-standard dialects there might be genuinely a novel grammatical construction which actually uses the preposition "of". I mean, you don't need to find that interesting, but I do. And if that is indeed the case, it would mean that the speakers of those dialects are not making a purely orthographic mistake like when people confuse "they're" and "their", for example, but are rather speaking or typing in their dialect.

[–] ronaldtemp1@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks man, that’s all I need to know 😉

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