English Language Learners Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for speakers of other languages learning English. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Let 'X' and 'Y' denote two different sentences. Then which of the following formulations is correct?
X. Having that said, Y.
X. Having said that, Y.
My personal reading experience is telling me the former one is right but later one also looks fine to me. Are both of these correct?
The phrase is having said that. It's a pre-formed phrase in the lexicon, and you should learn it as a single unit.
In the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), I searched for both phrases using the query . having said|that said|that ,. I found 367 results for having said that at the beginning of a sentence, and 0 results for having that said. Likewise, in the British National Corpus (BNC), I found 111 results for for the former and 0 results for the latter.
These results show that people don't really reverse the word order – or if they do, that they don't do it very often. In this case, said is a past participle in a perfect construction, not a participial adjective derived from a verb form, so it uses the standard word order with the object following the verb. The other word order isn't ungrammatical, but I recommend you stick to the usual way of saying it.
