Learn English – Is “has or will read” grammatical

conjunction-reductiongrammaticality

I just wrote [he] has or will read [some text] in an ELL chat room. But looking at it (or more accurately, listening to my "inner voice" trying to "read it aloud"), I find it bothers me a lot.

A quick check on Google Books finds a claimed 432 written instances of has or will read, and 910 instances of has read or will read, which suggests a significant minority of writers don't have a problem with the fact that the two different read's don't sound the same.

When I check the same construction with other verbs that don't have the same written form for past participle and present tense, it seems people nearly always include both (e.g. has worked or will work:1230, has or will work:8; has arrived or will arrive:357, has or will arrive:7).

I'm not usually a big fan of "grammatical rules", but it seems to me there "ought" to be a rule that you shouldn't delete one instance of the verb unless it's "the same" as the one you're keeping. And it also seems to me that since language is primarily spoken, "the same" ought to mean "sounds the same when spoken", not "looks the same when written".

Can anyone who knows more than me about formal rules of grammar settle this one?

As an aside, offhand I can't think of any verb where the past participle and present tense sound the same but are written differently (maybe there aren't any), but would deletion be okay in that case?

Best Answer

The relevant grammatical rules involved here are

  1. The Perfect auxiliary have must be followed by the past participle form of the next verb.
  2. Modal auxiliary verbs like will must be followed by the infinitive form of the next verb.
  3. Conjunction Reduction optionally deletes the first of two identical verbs following auxiliaries.

The question is what counts as "identical" for conjunction reduction. And the answer is that "identical" means "identical in sound". Nobody would ever say this sentence, for precisely the reasons described in the answers and comments here. That is, this isn't a question about English; this is about English spelling and reading, which is technology, not linguistics.

The problem with this sentence is that it looks like it's OK, but it doesn't sound like it.
Take a verb like sing, sang, sung, with different infinitive (sing) and past participle (sung) forms.
Then both

  • *He has or will sing that song
  • *He has or will sung that song

are ungrammatical, no matter which form is used.

And that's why

  • *He has or will read that book

is ungrammatical. It could only happen in writing; it's a cheat, like a sight rhyme. It really should be

  • He has red or will reed that book
    (spelled funnetikly)

because words pronounced differently can't do conjunction reduction.
And spelling doesn't count.

  • No English grammar rule has anything to do with spelling or punctuation.

If you try verbs with identical infinitive and past participle forms, like the set of
monosyllabic final-t verbs like set, set, set; cut, cut, cut; or put, put, put:

  • He has or will set the plan in motion.
  • He has or will cut them some slack.
  • He has or will put it on display in the main gallery.

These sound perfectly grammatical (if needlessly complex), to me. This despite the facts that

  • the set, cut, or put following will must be an infinitive,

but

  • the set, cut, or put following has must be a past participle.

The abstract grammatical category of the deleted verb seems to be irrelevant -- as long as they sound the same, they're identical. And as long as that's the case, you can delete the first one.

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