Possession of a Controlled Substantive: Light ‘have’ and Other Verbs of Possession

Verbs like get, give, and transitive want incorporate a possession component, and hence receive paraphrases that include the verb have as given in (1): (1) a. John wants the car. ↔ John wants to have the car. b. John got the car. ↔ John came to have the car. c. Mary gave John the car. ↔Mary caused John to have the car. Evidence for an underlying “have” comes from durative adverbials, which may modify the “have” state (McCawley 1974, Ross 1976, Dowty 1979, inter alia): (2) a. John wants the car (for two days). (want or have for two days) b. John got the car (for two days). (have for two days) c. John gave me the car (for two days). (have for two days) Furthermore, with want both events can be modified at the same time as in (3a), something not possible with non-possession verbs as in (3b). (3) a. On Monday, John wanted a car Tuesday. (want Monday, have Tuesday) b. #On Monday, John painted a car Tuesday. This suggests these sentences have an underlying semantic ‘have’ formative. Two theories have been proposed for how this formative enters the picture. On one view it is in the lexical decomposition of the verb, as in (4a) for give (Dowty 1979, Rappaport Hovav and Levin 2008). The other posits a silent syntactic formative (McCawley 1974), as in the analysis of Harley (2003: 34, (3b)) in (4b), where Phave raises and adjoins to vcause, which Spells-Out as give (Harley 2003: 34, (3b)). (4) a. give := [ x CAUSE [ z HAVE y ] ] b. vP