ellis@spar.UUCP (Michael Ellis) (02/27/85)
> (1) Why is "have got" often substituted for "have"? > (2) What is the connection between the verb of possession "have" (and, > of course, "have got") and the concept of obligation or necessity? > >I've got no light to shed on the first question, although I suspect that >there are historical reasons much more complicated than "the sentence didn't >feel like it had a verb." As for the second question, I can only point out >that other European languages do the same thing. Spanish, for instance, has >two verbs corresponding to "to have," one the helping verb "haber" and the >other the verb of possession "tener". Both are used by extension in >expressions of obligation or necessity: > > Hay que ir a la tienda. (It is necessary to go to the store.) > El tiene que ir a la tienda. (He has to go to the store.) (1) Hardly seems problematic, since `I have acquired' is so close to the meaning of `I have'. And Prentiss's explanation is more winning than he seems to feel -- there are many examples of extremely short meaning words falling into disuse. Witness the substitution of longer forms with `all-' for Latin's original short forms with `i-' in the verb (ire = to go). Likewise the Teutonic word cognate to `aqua' was `ig' or `i-' in Anglo-Saxon; modern English has preserved it only as the first syllable of the more substantial `island' (whose `s' was improperly inferred from `isle') (2) The periphrastic form HAVE + INFINITIVE seems to be used in many languages, with varying meanings. For instance, in Vulgar Latin the expression (dare habeo = to give + I have), from which the modern Romance futures derive, was used in place of the classical future (dabo = I will give). In Modern Greek, the same idea is used for a flavor of past tense, sometimes called `perfect' (ekho dhosei) = I have given). -michael