Timeline for Usage question: "I hadn't drank any coffee before I lived in Italy."
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
5 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 26, 2012 at 6:36 | comment | added | Adam | COCA and the BNC can't handle complicated phrases like 'hasn't drank'. NGrams is a great resource, but far from an end-all, be-all. Because I'm specifically talking about non-standard terminology, as opposed to English which has generally gone through a process of careful revision and scrutinization (like published material), I resorted to other means, such as an instance calculator for blogs and internet posts (phras.in). If you could recommend another source, that would be fantastic. | |
| Jun 24, 2012 at 11:11 | comment | added | Peter Shor | @Adam: Google hits numbers for phrases (as opposed to one-word queries) are complete nonsense. You have to use Google Ngrams or corpus searches to get the reasonable numbers. Compare here and here. The difference between "have drank" and "haven't drank" is not that big. | |
| Jun 24, 2012 at 10:03 | comment | added | Adam | My question is specifically why the negative present perfect usage of drink is more popular than the standard nowadays. Even a simple google search shows that haven't drunk has 128M hits, and haven't drank has 135M hits. That's more than just coincidence. Hasn't drank has 242M hits and hasn't drunk has 52M hits to make it even stranger. | |
| Jun 24, 2012 at 0:59 | history | edited | Peter Shor | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 81 characters in body
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| Jun 24, 2012 at 0:54 | history | answered | Peter Shor | CC BY-SA 3.0 |