Date: Thu, 13 Oct 1994 16:18:28 -0400
From: Ronald Butters amspeech[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ACPUB.DUKE.EDU
Subject: HAVE constructions
See "Existential and Causative HAVE . . . TO," AMERICAN SPEECH 61.2
(1986), 184-90. See also Lauri Karttunen, "On the Semantics of Complement
Sentences," PAPERS FROM THE SIXTH REGIONAL MEETING, CHICAGO LINGUISTIC
SOCIETY, 328-39. The AMERICAN SPEECH article points out that there is
regional dialect variation between HAVE and HAVE TO (as in, say, "I`ll
have these players (to) play something like the murder of my father
before my uncle") as well as the fact that there are both EXISTENTIAL and
CAUSATIVE senses. Actually, as Karttunen points out, there is also a
third sense--termed POSSESSIVE--as in "They had the money to buy the
sofa." I think that Ivan Sag has also done some work on the
syntax/semantics of the construction(s), but I have only a handout from a
paper that he gave in 1973 at the LSA Summer Meeting in Ann Arbor; Sag
uses the term HAPPENSTANCE HAVE rather than EXISTENTIAL HAVE.
I missed Bruce Southard`s original query on this topic, and so I
apologize if I have repeated any of his wisdom (or anyone else`s) here. I
think that Quirk et al. (COMPREHENSIVE GRAMMAR) also talk about these
various senses of HAVE; I know that Poutsma does.