I found this sentence in a book I was reading. In it, the author used “would’ve” in a way that you never would use it when speaking:
“I knew it’d be a popular excursion, so Lili and the system techs would’ve plenty of help finding and pulling the systems we needed.”
But try as I might, I cannot come up with an explanation as to why you don’t say this. Is it because you only use a contraction when “would have” is one concept? (i.e., the two words** together** constitute the verb?)
Just one of those little things that drive you crazy until you figure it out.
P.S. I am certain that the sentence was not meant to be “would’ve had plenty of help” because of the structure of the rest of the paragraph.
I don’t think it’s a grammatical rule but a matter of style and custom in pronunciation and informal writing.
“Would’ve” is usually a contraction of “would have” as a single concept (the auxiliary verb to make a pluperfect subjunctive*, hence the expectation that it stands for “would have had”), whereas if the author meant a simple subjunctive, the auxiliary verb is just “would”, so the “would” and the “have” are pronounced separately.
The use of “it’d” is also odd. I can find references to it being used as a contraction for “it would” but I don’t recall ever seeing it before, and I would of bet it tweren’t an actual word.
The sentence comes from A Bright Black Sea by C. Litka. In context, is it supposed to be some version of future speech? That might justify the odd usage.
I think the problem isn’t grammatical it’s more that “would’ve”, while being a contraction of “would have”, is recognized as a word in its own right and has its own definition. Therefore if you use the word in such a way that the definition doesn’t work, the word is misused.
You can use the example of a compound word like “bedroom”. We define that as a room someone sleeps in. Not every room with a bed is a bedroom. A mattress store display room isn’t a bedroom until someone begins sleeping in one or more beds there.
There are essentially two different versions of “have.” (Well, there’s actually more, but two at issue here.) The first is “have” as a normal verb meaning “possess,” and the other as an auxiliary verb that gives the verb following it a particular relationship with the time of the utterance.
And it turns out that in American English, only the second of these, the auxiliary use, can be contracted. There aren’t really any normal verbs that can form contractions. And so “have” doesn’t when used as a normal verb.
Does British English differ? I always found the last line of Pink Floyd’s Time to be slightly odd: The time is gone, the song is over,
Thought I’d something more to say.
Clearly, the “had” in “I’d” is in the normal possessive sense, not the auxiliary verb sense. Just poetic license or is there a language difference?
I agree with the above descriptions of the problem. The contraction of have to 've can be used only for the auxiliary have, not for the main verb. There is a similar situation with wanna. Consider the following pair of sentences:
This is the man I wanna succeed.
This is the man I want to succeed.
The first can mean only that I want to follow him (in some office or position, presumably). The second, while it can have that meaning is more likely to mean I hope he is successful. The difference is usually explained by a so-called trace (of an implicit subject of succeed) coming between want and to. In the first one, that trace is the object, not subject, of succeed. The point is that these contractions follow their own grammatical rules and the sentence of the OP violates one of them. Incidentally, the it’d doesn’t bother me at all.
I’m guessing editorial error. Possibly English as not a first language editorial error, but it could just be a goof. Words get left out all the time, you expect to see them there, and in this case it is just so close.
