He gots

Question

Hi,I just heard "he gots"... I also took a look on the net with Google, it seems common. Is that part of some dialect or not? It seems it's used in the UK too. Have you ever heard it? If so, how did you hear it used?

Feebs11 · Accepted Answer

Can you give more of the sentence in which it appeared? It is not a common usage here and it may relate to a dialect use.

Vorpar · Answer

It's a slangy way to say "he has". Not grammatically correct.

Used as "he has", possibly: "He gots the 40s."

Feathers · Answer

It seems to me all the examples I found indicate that it's one of the characteristics of Ebonics.  It's just my feeling, though...

Anonymous · Answer

No one has answered this adequately, so I'll try (4 years later). I heard this pattern when my daughter and her friend were around 3 or 4. Think of how we say "I've got five dollars" meaning "I possess" (now) rather than "I've received". In speech this is often shortened to "I got five dollars" still meaning "I have" present tense. This pattern is extended when people say "Do you got five dollars?". In this pattern "got" becomes equivalent to a regularized "have". So these girls would say "my daddy gots a fishing rod". Their linguistic logic was working correctly from the pattern they heard, but it resulted in something nonstandard.

Anonymous · Answer

The anonymous poster of March 16 is correct. Sometime around 1988 my 3 or 4 year old son said "Daddy, Geoffrey gots all the Star Wars men." Or something like that. This is an instance of the fact that very young native speakers of a language unconsciously use internalized rules of a language to generate forms and sentences they have not heard. Sometimes the new forms become generalized to other speakers and become widespread.

He gots

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