lobtomomyboy63’s examples are pretty much the discussion I had with my Québecoise roommate. “How can one word mean so much, enfin?!?” she asked.
A lot of the examples here just seem to be using “got” as the past tense of “get.” But the OP isn’t asking about that. They asked about using “got” in place of “have.”
I would argue that most of these cases are just situations where “have” or “has” have been dropped in colloquial speech. And that it is “have got” that has acquired a meaning that is equivalent to “have” or “possess.”
Baby got back…
I use the construction sometimes. I’m not saying it’s wrong.
When I was at school, a very long time ago, I was taught that “got” was best avoided wherever possible. Certainly never to be used instead of “have”.
The great Gershwin got away with it but not us ordinary mortals
I got rhythm
I got music
I got my man
Who could ask for anything more?
My dialect includes a lot of ellipses and elisions, so the statement “I got a car” is typically interpreted as an elision of "I’ve got a car, with the contraction either absent or so subtle that you just miss it but know it is there. It is kind of related to the way “would’ve”, et al, morphed into “woulda” and then ultimately began to appear as a distorted mix of the two written out as the cringeworthy “would of”.
From what I can tell, our flavor of English has become a strange sort of tonal language, where, if you cannot suss out the individual words in an utterance, you can often just follow the melody to capture the sense and meaning of what was said. Context helps a lot, of course.
Gotten is archaic. Surviving in compound forms like misbegotten and forgotten primarily
In the narrow sense, an example would be “What do you got?”. In a wider sense, all usage of “got” in a present tense meaning, rather than as a past tense form of another verb, such as “I got a brother” (yes, I know, such usage is not an infinitive in the grammatical sense, but it was this present versus past usage that I had in mind when I wrote my post).
Yes, indeed, that’s what I mean: Instances where “got” is not used in its original meaning as a past tense form of “get”, but in a present tense meaning.
Taking this question further: If “got” (or “have got”) is, grammatically, a past tense form but with a present tense meaning (synonymous with “to have” in the present tense), does that mean that it has to, or can, be used grammatically in a pluperfect form if I want to use in a past tense meaning? Examples:
- “I got blue eyes” - It seems this is widely used with a present tense meaning synonymous with “I have [now, in the present] blue eyes.”
- “My late grandfather had got blue eyes” - Would that be idiomatic, with the pluperfect form of “get” in a simple past meaning, synonymous with “My late grandfather had [when he was alive] blue eyes”? I would suppose it’s not used that way.
That sounds totally wrong and unnatural to me. Formal English would be ‘What have you got?’ and slangy, informal English would be ‘What you got?’ or ‘Whatcha got?’
Should be “I’ve got a brother”.
Perhaps it could appear in that form in a rap song or some dialect, but in normal conversation it would sound wrong to me.
Again, “I’ve got blue eyes.”
Sounds unnatural to me. It should be “My late grandfather had blue eyes”.
Not in my region of New Jersey. Gotten shows up with have, mostly in speech.
I’ll even write informally with it.
Thinking as I write:
Did you get a car yet? =
Have you gotten a car yet?
Have you got a car yet? Eh, doesn’t sound quite right to me. But I wouldn’t blink at it either.
Got, gotten is like many so-called American words, in that gotten was the original English that pretty much died out here but has lingered on in parts of North America.
Clarence “Frogman” Henry (gotta love someone nicknamed Frogman) sang a blues tune:
Ain’t got no home
A-no place to roam
Ain’t got no home
A-no place to roam
I’m a lonely boy
I ain’t got a home
But I especially like the chorus/bridge/whatever that goes something like this:
Ooo-ooo ooo-ooo ooo-ooo ooo-ooo ooo
Ooo-ooo ooo-ooo ooo-ooo ooo-ooo ooo
Ooo-ooo ooo-ooo ooo-ooo ooo-ooo ooo
Ooo-ooo ooo-ooo ooo-ooo ooo-ooo ooo
Ooo-ooo ooo-ooo ooo-ooo ooo-ooo ooo
Ooo-ooo ooo-ooo ooo-ooo ooo-ooo ooo
It’s common enough in my dialect, though it would come out as “Whaddaya got?” Bon Jovi has a song titled “What do you got?” (Ugh, when did he turn into a country singer? My childhood is ruined.)
But the Beatles sure got a lotta gots. “I got a Feeling”, “Got to Get You into my Life”, “Got to Hide your love Away”, “All I’ve Got to Do”…I’d keep typing but I got blisters on my fingers!
I believe the Brits somehow managed to turn “get” into a noun, though it is usually pronounced in a way that sounds more like “git”.
A git is somewhere between a twit and a twat, but nothing to do with get. I can’t think of any colloquial use of get as a noun.
Was I that unclear? “Got” is commonly used in English English, but “gotten” is not.
The word “got” makes me uncomfortable if I use it. I always try to use a better word. My 6th-grade teacher always called us out when we would use that word. She’d say, “You’ve got the Got Disease”. It’s stuck with me for 49 years.
Can’t ye, ye misbegotten get of a sea-dog?
I can’t find a cite online, but I swear I’ve seen the noun “get” used more than once in fiction to describe those who have been turned by and swear allegiance to a vampire. Like if Dracula bites you and turns you into a vampire, you are his get.