“I gotta go” or “I've gotta go” [closed]

Question

While watching American TV series, I sometimes see a sentence, "I’ve gotta go," but sometimes an actor says “I gotta go” instead.

Is there any difference between those things?

Answer 1

There is no difference except in formality of context.

"I gotta go" is merely a phonetic representation of the relaxed pronunciation of "I've gotta go" and the 'v' sound simply being missed out perhaps due to the speed it was said, accent, colloquialism or just informal/familiar setting.

It is similar to the phonetic writing of the word "have" as the word "of" as in the example "I would have" or "I would've" being written as "I would of" simply because it sounds like it and so more accurately describes the sound that was made.

When such things happen often they can themselves become a part of language, as we see with the word "gotta" used in this example - a phonetically spelled representation of a contraction of "got to" used so often it has now become a word in its own right.

At this point "I gotta go" would be considered grammatically incorrect and would probably only be accepted in scripts or formal writing as speech, although in the future due to usage that may change.

Answer 2

'I've gotta go'

is closer to the correct English of 'I have got to go'

and correspondingly

'I gotta go'

is closer to slang, which was brought in to allow for the uprisal of 'cool' in the 1950's. Later slang descended into 'I gorra go', and later still just 'gorra go', which is probably why people want to restore the language to it's former glories.

Answer 3

I believe you will find that what the actors say will firstly depend on what the script writers have written, and in turn depend on three main things about the writers -

1. Where are they from, geographically?
2. Where are they from, sociologically?
3. What language have they been exposed to: parents, peers, school etc.?

If they are ad-libbing (ad libitum -> optional) then the same three apply to the actor.

There is never such a thing as correct spoken language. Language evolves, it ebbs and flows, sometimes richer, sometimes more compact. If it did not (didn't) allow this, then the first human who pointed to a sunset and said "ooh" instead of "ug" would have been stoned.

Spoken language is for communication, is the meaning conveyed by "I gotta go" harder to understand than "I've gotta go" or "I have got to go"?

People blame the current contraction of language on texting, but when was the first time someone said "didn't" instead of "did not"?