A volunteer helping in an intermediate-level ESL class reports that one day the teacher introduced “must” and “have to”, in contexts such as
- You must renew your visa = You have to renew your visa.
- You must have a ticket to get into the show = You have to have a ticket to get into the show.
In the volunteer’s discussion group this provoked two phenomena:
1. A heated discussion about “have to have”. Many students thought that was crazy and couldn’t figure out what it meant. They didn’t think “have to renew” was crazy, but the usage was unfamiliar to many of them.
2. Partway through the discussion in the subgroup moderated by the volunteer, a student suddenly Saw The Light: “They’re talking about GOTTA!” (You gotta renew your visa. You gotta have a ticket to get into the show.)
“Must” “have to” and “gotta” occur in three different registers of English. In America, in my experience, “must” is uncommon in speech and occurs mostly in formal writing. “Have to” (or “hafta”) is informal and widely used in both speech and writing. In street-conversation, “gotta” is the usual usage. It is uncommon in writing. “You gotta” would be spelled “You’ve got to”. (You do hear “you’ve gotta” as well as “you gotta”.)
New immigrants are exposed to English in the work place and on the street, not in the home and not usually in formal circumstances. The teacher should have given “gotta” as a third alternative way of saying “must” right from the start, since clearly that is the term most familiar to most of them. She should probably have also pointed out the pronunciation “hafta”, which is not obvious from the “have to” spelling unless you are a Sophisticated Amateur Linguist like me.
PS
I should add that negating these expressions introduces complications. “Must not” does not mean the same thing as “don’t have to”. “Don’t got” is considered wrong, and plenty of people who say “gotta” in conversation, including me, don’t say “don’t gotta”; I would say “don’t have to” or “don’t need to” instead.
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Another negative form I’ve heard, rather rarely, is “haven’t got to”, which I suppose is an attempt to take “don’t gotta” and make it sound more correct. Ratcheting up the formality of the register, there is of course also “need not”, which very few native speakers would say out loud.
An issue which I know you’re well aware of, but is worth bringing up, is that different languages, like German, handle the negations of these expressions differently. “Ich muss” is “I must”, “Ich muss nicht” (literal translation: “I must not”) is “I don’t have to”, and “Ich darf nicht” (literal translation: “I may not”) is “I must not”.
One entertaining twist is the relationship between ‘have’ and stative ‘have got’:
Have you any bananas? (feels formal, UK)
Do you have any bananas? (USA)
Have you got any bananas? (informal UK, Oz, NZ)
(meaning ‘do you possess’, not ‘have you obtained’)
In spite of the register/dialect tagging, all three can be found in Agatha Christie books.
So then:
*Have we to leave
Have we got to leave
Do we have to (hafta) leave
‘Have got to’ has similar restrictions to ‘have got’, and
shares the more informal register variant ‘do got’:
We will have no money
*We will have got no money
*We will have to fix this
*We will have got to fix this
Do you got any?
Do you really gotta do this
The restriction is that have must be finite, and preferably
present tense. This at one time was somewhat exciting to ‘transformational grammarians’ because it sort of looked as if ‘have’ was moving out of main verb position into Aux if nothing else was already there, leaving ‘got’ behind, although that kind of analysis doesn’t quite work out in the end, I think.
There is various older literature on these things, and Heidi Quinn at Uni Canterbury an NZ has recently been looking at how some of them work in NZ English, but seems to have only abstracts available one
F.R. Palmer’s ‘The English Verb’ is a good source on some of this, including a full list of other ‘two part’ verbal expressions such as ‘had better’, etc.