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Wanting, Having, and Getting: A Note on Fodor and Lepore 1998
- Linguistic Inquiry
- The MIT Press
- Volume 35, Number 2, Spring 2004
- pp. 255-267
- Article
- Additional Information
This article takes up Fodor and Lepore's (1998) account of the meaning of [want DP]structures, according to which the verb to have is introduced at interpretation. With certain DP complements a want to have DP paraphrase of want DP is ill formed; the correct paraphrase uses get or give. To allow for this, F and L would have to vary the introduced verb depending on the meaning of the DP, but this would make their proposal "co-compositional," defeating its original purpose. If have, get, and give all contain the abstract preposition PHAVE (Harley 1995, Richards 2001), however, F and L's treatment may be appropriately revised: the element introduced by want is not have but PHAVE. F and L can avoid co-compositionality at the price of allowing lexical decomposition.