have (got) to INFINITVE – English Grammar Profiler

Collocations of HAVE TO in the COCA corpus (9 tokens left and right):

1 WORRY (VVI ) 4009 2 CAREFUL (JJ ) 2155 3 ADMIT (VVI ) 1572 4 VIGILANT (JJ ) 176

5 RELEARN (VVI ) 33

One can guess there is a generally negative tone to this grammar structure from the above verbs and adjectives.
It is also much more represented than “have got to”:

1 KIDDING (VVG ) 46
2 CAREFUL (JJ ) 25

If we then take our most common collocation “have to worry” and search on the NOW corpus with 4 tokens left and right:

1 N’T (XX ) 16710 2 ABOUT (II_RP@ ) 1323 3 DO (VD0 ) 11437 4 ABOUT (II ) 9926 5 WO (VM ) 2287 6 DID (VDD ) 2142 7 DOES (VDZ ) 1593 8 NEVER (RR ) 1446 9 GETTING (VVG ) 782

10 LONGER (RR22 ) 552

We see that negation ranks highly, but seems to be reassuring.

This a collection across the levels of A2-C2 where this grammar item appears with the English Grammar Profile examples colour-coded.