I know that "had to have +past participle" can be used for deduction about the past, so when it comes to the negative, can I use both "hadn't got" and "didn't have" + past participle (to mean that something can't have happened)?
I knew that my friend never got lost in the forest, but that time, he'd been there abnormally long, so when my mom said, "He will have got lost," I said that he (hadn't got/didn't have) to have got lost.
I knew that my friend never got lost in the forest, but that time, he'd been there abnormally long, so when my mom said, “He will have got lost,” I said that he [hadn’t got / didn’t have] to have got lost.
English multi-word verb constructions are especially hard for learners, even if you are yourself a native speaker of another language that’s descended from ancestral Proto-Indo-European just like English is. It seems to me that you do already have a pretty good but not yet perfect grasp of the nuances in these sorts of construction that so often plague learners, and that you’re just trying to fine-tune your understanding of them.
First, let’s take for granted that these five statements all mean essentially the same thing as one another because they’re all about the speaker’s belief in the strong likelihood of some past event having actually occurred:
Given that, I believe that the heart of your question then boils down to how best to negate that statement of belief or likelihood — or at least how to say that his having gotten lost isn’t the only possible explanation that one should consider. So for doing that, your first choice is wrong — because for the negation you cannot say:
Because that’s not grammatical for the sense you want. It’s possible to use hadn’t got to but not in the sense you desire here so if you did use it, it would have a different meaning. That’s because had not got to do something means did not get to do something: the opportunity never presented itself or perhaps that it was not acted on when it did show up. So to get to do something isn’t what you want here.
What you need is to use do-support (by way of did marked in the past tense) for the to have to do something construction. You need to say it this way instead:
As in:
Perhaps followed by one of these using to have an accident:
Or by using to get into an accident, such as with one of these:
Note that here the have in to have before a past participle is normally pronounced like of is, and the whole thing may be [tuv] or [təv] in connected speech. That’d because although the first have needs the strong form and devoices to [ˈhæftə], but the second one needs the weak form [əv].
See also the related questions about:
