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
Do you use Got (Past Tense) instead of Have which is I think present tense ?
I know both sentences have same meaning :
I "got" some good news for you.
I have some good news for you.
We know Got is past tense form & Have is present tense ... I think when we want to say "I have some good news for you." we should say :
I "get" some good news for you. Why we change the tenses ...?
"I have" and "I have got" / "I've got" mean the same thing. "I have got" (although it has the appearance of a perfect) is another way of saying "I have".
In informal American speech, "I got" is sometimes used as an abbreviated form of "I have got". This isn't considered acceptable in formal usage and is rarely found in British usage. Sometimes "Do you got" is heard as a non-standard alternative to "Do you have" / "Have you" / "Have you got".
(Of course, in both British and American English, "got" is also the correct, standard simple past form of "get", and in British English, "have got" doubles up as the correct perfect form of "get"; Americans use "have gotten" as the perfect of "get", reserving "have got" for the meaning "have".)
Because the sentences strictly mean different things. The first sentence specifies that the good news was received in the past. The second sentence specifies that I continue to remember that good news.
"I got some good news for you, but I don't have it any longer because I forgot it."
In the normal case, the two ideas are closely related logically. I cannot remember now what I never learned so saying I have some good news now must logically mean that I received that news before now.
.
