Author Archives: Guillaume Jacques

Need and Have, again

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Almost two years ago, I posted on DLC a comment on an article published in Linguistic Inquiry:
After posting, I was contacted by Richard Kayne himself, and had rich discussions with him. This encouraged me to turn the posting into an article. I co-wrote it with my colleague Anton Antonov, who discovered the other counterexamples in various languages (we decided to abandon the original Japhug example as it was too complicated to explain in a few pages). The article is now published:

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/ling/45/1

This article would never have been written without DLC, and it shows that this blog can foster discussions between generativists and typologists.

Guillaume Jacques

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Panchronic semantics

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In historical linguistics, it is obvious that the general principles of phonetic changes (which some, following Haudricourt, call ‘Panchronic Phonology’) are much better understood than those operating in morphology, and that historical morphology is generally better understood than historical syntax (a field which is however undergoing important developments in recent times with articles such as Eythorsson and Barðdal 2005).

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Guillaume Jacques

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Need and have

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In a recent article, Harves & Kayne (2012: 120-121) proposed the following universal generalization:

(1) “All languages that have a transitive verb corresponding to need have an overt verb expressing predicative possession […] such that the possessor has nominative case and the possessee is a direct object (with accusative case and no preposition).”

The authors introduce the terms “H-languages” an “B-languages” for classifying languages as regards to their predicative possession constructions. H-languages have a transitive verb meaning ‘to have’ where the possessor is treated as the agent of the verb, while B-languages use a construction with a verb ‘to be, to exist’ and the agent is marked with oblique case. Continue reading →

Guillaume Jacques

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