Hi, all. How’s it going? Nesse episódio do podcast Inglês Online falamos sobre como você vai ouvir perguntas às vezes de gente que fala muito rápido em inglês.

Transcrição

Hi, everyone. What’s up? Today we have a new episode of the inglesonline podcast. To download or just listen to other episodes and download transcripts, go to inglesonline.com.br and click Podcast Inglesonline.

So let’s take a look today at something that may confuse you if you’ve been listening to podcasts or watching TV series and films in their original language.  This is something that took me a while to acquire – what I mean by this is, it took me a certain amount of listening to English to finally get this and absorb it, and incorporate it to my speech. It didn’t make sense to my ears in the beginning, but… enough with the mystery. I’m talking about the way the beginning of some questions is omitted in everyday speech.  What do I mean by that? I’ll show you.

These are a couple of questions you’ll hear people ask in everyday conversation:

* Anyone have a pen?

* Everyone see the show?

They may sound weird to you. You may ask yourself, Are these really questions?  They sound wrong. After all, we learn that ‘anyone’ and ‘everyone’ are the third person of the singular and therefore, we say ‘anyone has’ and ‘everyone sees’.

Well, let’s see: take the first one, Anyone have a pen? That is actually the quick, shorter version of Does anyone have a pen? When people are talking fast they will often skip “Does” and just go with the rest of the question. In my first few months in the US I would often say something like “Anyone HAS a pen?” because in my mind ‘anyone’ goes with ‘has’, not ‘have’.

This is a question, though, and it is a question in the present tense. The present tense calls for does when you’re using anyone. We say Does anyone have a pen? And, of course, one way to make ‘Does anyone have a pen?’ shorter is by skipping that little word at the beginning, ‘does’, and saying simply Anyone have a pen?

And that is exactly what many native speakers do and that’s why you will sometimes hear things like Anyone know what time the movie starts?, which comes from Does anyone know what time the movie starts?. Or Get it?, which comes from Do you get it? and You know what I mean?, which comes from… you guessed it. Do you know what I mean? The last two don’t sound so weird because we’re used to “you know”.

And here’s the other example I gave at the beginning: Everyone see the show? If you don’t get this question and you think “everyone see” sounds super weird… here’s why: this is a shorter version of Did everyone see the show? The speaker is obviously talking to a group of people and he or she wants to know whether everyone in the group saw a certain show. The auxiliary word “did” in Did everyone see the show? disappears and the question asked by this fast-talker becomes Everyone see the show?

Now, you may be asking yourself “But how would I know? How can I know this person is asking a question in the past if they’re not starting the question with DID” Well, the same way you know when a friend sees you and asks “So, how was the party?” What party is your friend talking about? Oh, your girlfriend’s birthday party. You told your friend yesterday that your girlfriend was gonna throw a big party to celebrate her birthday. Your friend sees you today and asks about the party. You know immediately what he’s talking about.

Same thing with that other person. When they ask “Everyone see the show?” they’re talking to people who are going to get the question, because they have talked about this show before.