To Have and to Not Have

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I'm looking for as much information as possible about HAVE type verbs

(ie verbs with a 'possessor' subject and a 'possessed' direct object)

cross-linguistically.  I have provided a list of typical uses of HAVE

in English, which could come in useful for comparison.





1  Lucy had a brother

2  Lucy had a baby

3  Lucy had a top hat on

4  Lucy had her car fixed (causative)

5  Lucy had her car stolen (experiencer)

6  Lucy had succeeded

7  Lucy had to go to Paris



Examples from non-indoeuropean languages in particular would be most

gratefully received.

My reply, August 10, 1997

Of course there are other uses of HAVE in English, for example:

• I have three years experience in such things. (possession? only from an English speaker's point of view because in English we use the word "have")
• I had it up to here. (idiom)
• Had I taken the advice, I never would have gone. (conditional)
• Lucy has cancer. (a state?)

However, looking for HAVE verbs in other languages is of course like looking for the verb BE. It assumes that other languages have them or use them or that they mean the same thing or that they refer to similar relationships between the nouns in the sentence, etc. Verbs like these are much like the concepts discussed in Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff & Johnson).

Spanish versions of some of your English examples:

• 1 Lucy tiene un hermano. "Lucy has a brother"
• 3 Lucy tiene puesto un sombrero. "Lucy has a hat on" (Lucy has ((that is) put on) a hat)
• 6 Lucy ha cantado. "Lucy has sung"
• 7 Lucy tuvo que ir a Paris. "Lucy had to go to Paris"

• a. Lucy tiene hambre. "Lucy is hungry"
• b. Lucy tiene ganas de ir. "Lucy feels like going"

The problem with comparing things like this across languages is that you inevitably run into problems with whether you are comparing verbs that kind-of-sort-of overlap or basic world-views that are imposed by the languages' words. In Spanish "tener" is sometimes translated as "have", but so is "haber". But not always. "Haber" is also in some constructions, "there is/are." It is almost silly to say that "tener" and "haber" mean "have". If you can "have a baby" in English but Spanish uses another verb, does that mean that, in some sense, in some instances, Spanish doesn't have the verb "have"?

Things only get worse as you go further from English. Russian:

• a. U menya brat'. "I have a brother" (To me (there is) (a) brother)
• b. Ya prochital knigu. "I have read the book" (I (finished) reading (the) book)

There is no such thing as a present perfect in Russian, so does this mean that Russian has no "have"? The point is that verbs behave very differently even in other IE languages.

Some Japanese:

• a. (Watashi-wa) kuruma-ga aru. "I have a car." (first-person-Topic (often optional in many situations) car-Subject there-is/are)
• b. Nihon-o ryokou suru koto ni shita. "I have decided to take a trip to Japan" (Japan-Object travel-do Sentence-Nominalizer-Object did)

To me Japanese sentence a. does not mean "have". It is not a translation for English "have". It means no more or less than "watashi-ga kuruma-ga aru." In Japanese it is not a possessor-possessed relationship. The only reason in English we call it a possessor-possessed relationship is because, when speaking English, English uses the word "have" which seems to mean "possess".

As for Japanese sentence b., as you can see, there is no have, there is no present perfect, there is no explicit subject, there is definitely no possessor-possessed.

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     Alan Pagliere              e-mail: apagliere@umi.com 

  Ann Arbor, Michigan 

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               I'm parsing as fast as I can!

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