What are the grammatical and semantic roles plays the particle "of" in the next sentence?
You had to of seen it before
Source: Conversation with an Aussie
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Sign up to join this communityI suspect that you've misheard your Aussie conversation partner. In particular, they're almost certainly contracting
You had to have seen it before.
And (by not stressing have
) turning it into
You had to've seen it before.
What makes this confusing is that 've
(i.e. unstressed have
) is pronounced just like of
. In fact, it's a frequent enough source of confusion (often in phrases like "could of" instead of "could've") that Oxford Dictionaries has a page dedicated to it. They consider it an error, and I'd agree, though — because it's fairly common — you're likely to come across it in the wild.
of
but they should usehave
. I think it should be: You had to have seen it before. A simple Google Search of phrasehad to of
gives me just a bit over 700,000 results, mostly forum posts.