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What do you have to pay? What does this mean?



 
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use sg for doing sg or use sg to do sg | position of 'very often' in a sentence
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What do you have to pay? What does this mean? #1 (permalink) Sun Jan 13, 2008 9:34 am   What do you have to pay? What does this mean?
 

Hi everyone, can you tell me how you will interpret this sentence:

How much money do you have to pay ?

What does the speaker mean ?
- He is asking how much money we must (= have to) pay, OR
- He is asking how much money we have in our wallet, the money we will use for paying.

In other words, there are two possible answers for the question:
- I have to pay 10 dollars.
- I have 10 dollars to pay.
Sympathy
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What do you have to pay? What does this mean? #2 (permalink) Sun Jan 13, 2008 12:26 pm   What do you have to pay? What does this mean?
 

Hi Sympathy

I would interpret that question as meaning "How much must you pay?"

If I wanted to know how much money was in someone's wallet (for whatever reason), I would not include "to pay" in the sentence. I'd simply ask "How much money do you have?"
.
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