From HAVE to HAVE verbs: relations and incorporation

Abstract

We bring together two lines of research. The first is that of so-called HAVE-verbs, which come with the peculiarity of allowing for bare nominal objects in Norwegian, Catalan, Romanian, etc. These languages normally impose the use of articles in argument position and don’t have a generalized incorporation option. The second is that of HAVE itself, a verb that has been claimed to select (predicative) relations rather than arguments in many languages including English. We argue that the literature on relational HAVE provides the key to understanding why HAVE-verbs behave as incorporation verbs. We further show how a unified analysis sheds light on the scopal properties of relational HAVE.