Have: An Essentialist Semantics
نویسنده
چکیده
There is cross-linguistic variation in the choice of the verbal copula used to express the HAVE relation. Many languages use be instead of have. For example, Turkish and Latin use be systematically and most other languages (including English) do so at least in certain constructions. There are also languages where a copula is not required (some Bantu languages, Malagasy for certain constructions, etc). Morphological weakening or “bleaching” of the copular verb correlates with a language’s ability to express certain semantic relations (kin, possession, etc.) through morphological cases. For example, in Turkish the meaning of have is expressed by the copula plus a genitive DP (Lees 1972; Kelepir 2007) — this option is also possible in English, and other languages for possessive constructions: This is ours = We have this. In Latin, where the copular verb is be (essere), possessive meaning is expressed via dative case marking on the postcopular DP (Bauer 1996): Libri sunt mihi ‘The books are mine’. Finally, in certain Malagasy have-constructions there actually is no copula linking the two terms of the have-relation (Keenan and Ralalaoherivony 2000):
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