Having ‘Need’ and Needing ‘Have’

Abstract

A survey of a number of the world’s languages reveals that only those languages that have a transitive verb used to express possession (i.e., Have-languages) also have a transitive verb ‘need’. No Be-language lacking a transitive verb for possession has a transitive verb ‘need’. This generalization suggests a Hale and Keyser ( 1993 , 2002 )–style incorporation approach, whereby nominal ‘need’ incorporates to an unpronounced verbal HAVE, yielding transitive verbal ‘need’.

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

“…The facts presented in this squib offer a challenge to Harves and Kayne's (2012) generalization, as languages from four unrelated language families spoken on three different continents without any Hconstruction turn out to have an N-type construction. The authors' hypothesis is thus unlikely to be valid as an absolute universal.…”

“…Still, the revised version of Tsunoda's hierarchy has not contested the validity of Tsunoda's ordering of verb type classes 5 and 6, which are directly relevant to the present discussion. Thus, the generalization one would be tempted to make on the basis of this hierarchy predicts that if a language has a transitive verb 'to have', it should also have a transitive verb 'to need', exactly the opposite of Harves and Kayne's (2012) proposal.…”

“…First, the sample used by Harves and Kayne (2012) has a clear Eurasian bias. Although some non-Eurasian languages are included (Amharic, Guarani, Mapudungun, Purépecha, Mohawk, and Quechua), they represent only approximately one-eighth of the sample.…”

“…Peruvian (Cuzco, Cajamarca, Huallaga) and Bolivian Quechua are presented by Harves and Kayne (2012) as examples of B-languages without transitive 'need'. While we have been unable to verify this claim, Ayacucho Quechua has a transitive verb whose primary meaning is 'want', but which is the normal (and seemingly only) way to translate English need (Soto Ruiz 2010:102 et passim).…”

“…(Harves and Kayne 2012:129) (3) Minu-lla on häne-t. I-ADESS be.3SG he-ACC 'I have him.' (Harves andKayne 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 an intransitive verb), A (subject of a transitive verb), and O (object of a transitive verb).…”