Transitive NEED Does Not Imply Transitive HAVE: Response to Harves and Kayne 2012

Correction:
In the authors’ affiliations, CRALO should be CRLAO. The letters were transposed in error during the editing process. The online version has been corrected.

1 Introduction

In a recent article, Harves and Kayne (2012:120–121) propose the following universal:

1. (1). All languages that have a transitive verb corresponding to need are languages that have an accusative-case-assigning verb of possession.

The authors’ argument for the validity of (1) is based upon a typological survey of about 50 languages. They introduce the terms H-languages and B-languages in order to classify languages from the viewpoint of their predicative possessive constructions. H-languages have a transitive verb ‘to have’ whose subject is the possessor and whose object is the possessee. B-languages, on the other hand, use a construction with a copular or existential verb in which the possessor is marked with an oblique case and the possessee is treated as the subject of an intransitive verb.

This terminology presents two major problems.

First, it neglects the fact that one language can have several competing constructions to express possessive predication. This is for example the case of Latin, which according to table 1 (adapted from Harves and Kayne 2012:126) is an “H-language,” whereas the most common predicative possessive construction in this language is of the type normally found in a “B-language.” It would thus be more appropriate to talk of B- and H-constructions rather than of B- and H-languages.

Second, the classification of possessive predicative constructions into two classes neglects the recent work of typologists on this topic, which distinguishes many more categories (Heine 1997, Stassen 2009, 2011). Stassen (2011), in particular, classifies these constructions into five types (have-possessive, locational possessive, genitive possessive, topic possessive, conjunctional possessive), to which he adds some transitional types.¹

Table 1.

H-construction versus B-construction languages and the presence or absence of a transitive ‘need’

Furthermore, Harves and Kayne do not seem to take into consideration the fact that in many languages constructions corresponding to the English verb need often have additional (and usually primary) meanings such as ‘want’, ‘have to’, and ‘lack’, and the fact that many languages have distinct constructions for expressing ‘need’ with inanimate (‘I need money’) and animate, particularly human, nouns (‘I need someone’), as well as with a complement clause (‘I need to go’). We will not address these issues in this squib.

Table 1 provides a classification of the languages in Harves and Kayne’s survey along the following two parameters: languages with an H- or B-construction versus languages with an N-construction (presence of transitive ‘need’) or -construction (absence of transitive ‘need’). This table, of course, does not consider the possibility that one language may have several types of constructions for the same meaning.

According to Harves and Kayne, while languages that have -constructions can also have B- or H-constructions, there are no examples of languages with N-constructions that at the same time have only a B-construction for expressing predicative possession.

It should be noted that (1) accounts not only for languages with transitive ‘have’ but also for those that have a quasi-B-type predicative possessive construction in which the possessee receives accusative case. Thus, languages like Finnish that have a transitive verb meaning ‘to need’ as in (2) and an accusative-case-assigning existential verb as in (3) do not constitute counterexamples to (1) even though they do not have a prototypical transitive verb corresponding to ‘have’ (Harves and Kayne 2012:129–130).

• (2). Minä  tarvitse-n sinu-t.

  I.nom need-1sg you-ACC

  ‘I need you.’

  (Harves and Kayne 2012:129)

• (3). Minu-lla on     häne-t.

  I-adess   be.3sg he-acc

  ‘I have him.’

  (Harves and Kayne 2012:129, adapted from Pylkkänen 1998:4)

Still, (1) suffers from accusativity bias, and so it seems preferable to us to provide a crosslinguistically neutral formulation using Dixon’s (1994) syntactic primitives S (sole argument of...