“‘To have’ is used in a variety of ways. In the first place it is used with reference to habit or disposition or some other quality, for we are said to ‘have’ a piece of knowledge or a virtue. Then, again, it has reference to quantity, such as someone’s height; for one is said to ‘have’ a height of three or four cubits. It is used, moreover, with regard to the body, such as ‘have’ a coat or tunic; or part of it, as a ring on the hand; or a body part, like a hand or a foot. Or as in a container, as in the case of a vessel [having] wheat; or of a jar, wine; for a jar is said to ‘have’ wine, and a medimnos, wheat. All that is said to be ‘had’ as in a container. Or it refers to a possession; we are said to ‘have’ a house or a field. We are also said to ‘have’ a wife, and a wife a husband, and this appears to be the most remote meaning of ‘have’, for by it we mean nothing but ‘live together’. There may be other uses of ‘have’, but the usual ones have been enumerated just about completely.”
This quotation does not come from the book under review — what need for a book if everything can be listed in one paragraph? As readers will have suspected, this is a quote from Aristotle ( Categories 15b18-end). Does modern linguistics have something to add to Aristotle’s insights? We have certainly waited a long time for a modern treatment of ‘have’ since the appearance of Kahn’s
This book, the author’s Lund University (Sweden) dissertation, focuses on
Since Indo-European languages do not have a ‘have’ verb in common, the conclusion imposes itself that all ‘have’ verbs are language-internal developments. What tends to happen is that a verb meaning ‘hold’ or ‘keep’ develops a less concrete use as ‘have’. The result is that possession can be expressed in two different ways: the standard ‘be’ plus dative, and the new transitive construction, with the latter becoming dominant over time.4
Naturally, it is difficult to delimit precisely where ‘hold’ or ‘keep’ stop and ‘have’ begins. Moreover, focusing on the correct translation equivalent in another language may compound the difficulties. No matter how popular the practice once was, it cannot be assumed that English verbs in caps or quotes can provide a universal, basic semantics that is in no need of further analysis. K.’s quandary over distinguishing ‘have’ and ‘get’ (she seems surprised that (p. 3) “there is no particular verb for expressing the notion of ‘get'” and that (p. 4) “Modern Greek still has not developed an equivalent of ‘get'”) seems to arise from a need to have things work the way they work in some Western European languages, rather than from an appreciation of the aspectual system, which of course is very much alive in Greek to this day. (The importance of aspect and its interplay with lexical meaning is largely ignored, cp. the observations on the distribution of present and aorist forms over verb meaning like ‘keep’ and ‘stop’, p. 41, which are doubtless correct but are left unexplained.5)
Given that the determination of verb meaning in particular instances is so complicated, criteria should be given that distinguish ‘have’ from ‘keep’ and ‘hold’ on the one hand, and ‘get’ on the other. The principal differences seem clear enough semantically: ‘keep’ and ‘hold’ imply control on the part of the possessor which is absent in the case of ‘have’ (and ‘get’), ‘get’ implies a change of state which is absent in the case of ‘have’6 (and ‘keep’ and ‘hold’). Unfortunately, there will not always be sufficient evidence whether ‘control’ is involved or not. Does a position imply control, in other words, is it “I keep my valuables in the safe” and not “I have“? How do we know that a Greek would draw the line where an English speaker does?7
A look at the OED, where the entry for ‘have’ amusingly does refer to Aristotle’s ancient wisdom, will suffice to illustrate the complexity of English ‘have’. Where does that leave us when we start looking for Greek equivalents? K. never quite makes up her mind whether to start solely from form (all instances of transitive
There are alternatives: When one investigates the two rival expressions for ‘possession’, it seems that clauses that actually express possession rather than location should be the focus of attention. This would imply that all clauses with location expressions should be discarded, leaving ‘Aeneas has a shield’, ‘Those weapons belong to Ajax’, and the like.8 Expressions of the sort ‘Wrath has Achilles’ would not enter into this.9 The principal question would be what factor or factors determine the choice between
Another option would be to take all instances of transitive
Fortunately, the methodological problems do not mean this study has nothing to offer students of Greek. Chapters 5-11 on ‘have’ in seven different samples ranging from Linear B e-ke to Isocrates at least begin to give an answer to the question raised above. K. classifies the possessors and possessions in
The picture that emerges from K.’s examination of the evidence is one that those familiar with issues of grammaticalization will have come to expect. The rise to prominence of
Notes
1. Kahn (1973), The verb “be” in ancient Greek (and specifically his section on the possessive construction of ‘be’, pp. 265f.), is only one of a number of relevant studies not cited. See below.
2. However, when she states (p. 3): “There are examples of
3. Chapter 3 is devoted to ”
4. I see no references to typological studies of possession, such as Hansjakob Seiler (1983), Possession as an operational dimension of language and especially Bernd Heine (1997), Possession. Cognitive sources, forces, and grammaticalization. Heine objects to the characterization of PIE as a ‘be’ language for the reason that no ‘have’ has survived in the later languages. He argues that ‘have’ can have a very short life cycle, going from esse to habere to tener/ter in the documented history of Spanish and Portuguese. For Latin, see B. Löfstedt (1963), ‘Zum lateinischen possessiven Dativ’, ZVS 78: 64-83; A.M. Bolkestein, ‘Dative and genitive possessors in Latin’, in S.C. Dik (ed.) (1983), Advances in Functional Grammar, 55-91. H. Pinkster notes ( Sintaxis y semantica del Latín : (1995), Appendix, p. 339) that in Latin the two constructions are not interchangeable: “En el periodo clásico predominan los sujetos abstractos en la construcción de dativo possessivo, siendo relativamente poco frecuentes los accusativos abstractos en la otra construcción. En el latín plautino son normales los sujetos concretos”.
5. Chapter 4 deals with ‘have’ in the different tense stems and suffers most from the confusion over aspect, and the unclear boundaries of English ‘have’ and ‘get’, which should not enter into the argument. Greater familiarity with the narrative uses of the different stems would have been helpful in the interpretation of, e.g., Hdt 4.42.4 (p. 16), 8.138.3 (p. 43). In the discussion of the future, Symp. 205c5 is quoted, where Burnet (cited on p. xv as the edition used) in fact prints a (generic) present.
6. The OED does of course recognize an inchoative ‘have’, as in ‘have a baby’. On reflection it becomes clear that ‘get’ in English does seem to allow for some measure of control. This is yet another reason to avoid describing one language in terms of another. For classifications of verb meanings, Z. Vendler (1967), Linguistics in Philosophy would be one place to start. See in addition A. Rijksbaron (1989), Aristotle, verb meaning and functional grammar.
7. In English, at least, ‘keep’ has an additional suggestion of permanence and principle: “I try to keep an umbrella in my office, but I have it in the car right now”. And this last example brings us to an additional problem. “I have an umbrella in the car” does not really express a relation of possession — this statement is not equivalent to “I possess an umbrella, which is located in my car”, but more likely to be used when you find yourself not having an umbrella when you actually need one, or when you are rejecting the advice to take one.
8. Strictly speaking, indefinite objects and locative expressions may still denote possession: ‘She has a cottage in Wisconsin’ denotes possession, not temporary position, but this group should be assessed on a case-by-case basis (see above n. 7, umbrellas in cars). Definite objects will denote temporary position rather than possession: ‘Achilles has his shield in front of him/to his side’.
9. Since F. Mawet (1979) other studies on these expressions of emotion have appeared: see for a more recent study and references, A. Rijksbaron (1992), “D’où viennent les ‘algea'”, in F. Létoublon, La Langue et les textes en grec ancien: actes du colloque Pierre Chantraine, pp. 181-191, and by the same author, ‘Further observations on expressions of sorrow and related expressions in Homer’, In: E. Banfi (ed.), Atti del secondo rencontro internazionale di linguistica greca, Trento 1997, pp. 215-242.
10. For this approach, see for instance R. Langacker (1987), Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. B. Heine (above, note 4) adopts a prototypical approach for the notion of possession, using five criteria (p. 39): (1) Possessor is a human being (2) Possessee is a concrete item (3) Possessor has the right to make use of the possessee (4) Possessor and possessee are in spatial proximity (5) Possession has no conceivable temporal limit. The various types of possession can be characterized as conforming to some or all of these criteria.
11. Some familiarity with the literature on animacy/empathy/topic hierarchies would have paid off, starting with, e.g., B. Comrie (1989), Language Universals and Linguistic Typology. See above note 4 for recent typological studies.
12. Definiteness and genericity (not mentioned) are not distinguished, however, i.e. definite articles are simply taken to denote definiteness, e.g. the citation (p. 19, n.43) of Hdt. 4.192.1
13. It is merely symptomatic that no reference is made to works dealing with pragmatics, no definitions of topic or focus are given by K. herself, and all but one of the examples used in the section on topic and focus (pp. 18-20) are made up. The work has an annotated index locorum, a bibliography that is strongest on the historical-comparative aspects, weak on general linguistics, specifically semantics, syntax, and pragmatics, and linguistic typology (see the bibliography in B. Heine (1997) for up-to-date references). I have not noticed misprints, but the frequent oddities in the English text could have done with a sterner editorial hand.