My friend, Bernie, brought this up to me as a pet peeve, so well - let me just pick it up in here.
Right on will I say that between one and the other, the latter is the correct one. We say: 'I must have had too much wine.' Or maybe, 'I must have had temporary amnesia!' But I do hear people interchange these two utterances, it's true: - 'must have had' and 'must of had'. I am not just sure if they also write it as 'must of had' - still, this is not grammatical.... it wouldn't make sense.
If we were to argue for the grammaticality or the correctness of 'I must have had too much wine', this we have to 'oversimplifyingly' point out...even if, by chance, we have to wake up demons of old, boring, grammar classes. The predicate or the second half of the sentence, (the first half being made up of the subject 'I'), is made up of the verb 'had' preceded by the so-called helping verbs 'must have'. As it is, we have an instance of two helping verbs. The first, 'must', puts forward the probable happening of the verb 'have' whereas the second auxiliary verb, 'have', indicates the perfection or the state of being finished or of being already done of the main verb 'have'. Which is why, if I may go on, rather than thinking of the verb as in the past tense, because it is not time identified, .... it is actually in the past perfect tense - it is focused on a completed action.
So that now, if we were to put together the lexical items, 'must of had', the item 'of' would have no business being there. For one, 'of' being a preposition, it comes before a noun phrase as when we say, 'of Bernie', 'of the sunset', 'of my insatiable curiosity'. We don't say 'of jumped', or 'of dancing'. And we wouldn't say, 'of had'. But we do have an explanation for that. I talked to my granddaughter, Tanya, at the University of Southern California, and she says: "I think the proper way is to say 'must have had', but when you slur it, the first two words kinda sound like 'must of'. That's why it seemingly goes "must of have" and it's caught on so much we're not sure which one is right." And I think so, too.
But I guess, I'd also want to point out that phonetic concern which makes for the situation. We actually don't say 'must have had' in single words all the way. In speech, we actually contract it into 'must've had' - what Tanya indicates as 'slur'. And notice that the schwa sound, the 'uh' sound, in the contracted 've' from 'have' is also the very same sound in 'of' in 'must of'. Because 'of' isn't really pronounced with an 'f' sound; it is pronounced with a 'v' sound. Which is why Tanya says the utterance 'must have' "kinda sounds like 'must of". And the truth then is, they do sound the same. But sorry, this does not make our 'must of had' correct.
Therefore, if only for grammaticality's sake, we use 'must have had' or 'must've had' rather than 'must of had'! Right, Bernie?
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Thanks, Bernie Floresca!
Thanks, Tanya Parker!
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