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Silent HAVE needs revisiting: (Non-)possessive meanings with transitive intensional ‘need’ in Russian
I discuss two ‘need’ + NP constructions in Russian, namely (i) the more basic con- struction with a nominative theme and (ii) the underdescribed, highly colloquial construction with an accusative theme. Building on work on the semantics of pos- sessive constructions, I show that the two constructions di er as to which seman- tic relations they can express. Speci cally, the nominative construction can not only express the control relation (the most prototypical possessive relation), but also a variety of others, whereas the accusative construction is restricted to the control relation, as manifested in the animacy and concreteness restrictions associ- ated with it. Based on previous work on intensional transitive verbs, I analyze both constructions as involving a concealed clausal complement with a silent have but extend this analysis by assuming that have selects an NP complement via a syntac- tically represented type-shi ing operator, which encodes the respective semantic relations expressed in the construction. I further argue that the accusative con- struction incorporates the type-shi er for the control relation, thus accounting for its selectional restrictions, and tentatively suggest that this might also explain the accusative marking. Finally, I report the results of three acceptability rating studies testing the animacy and concreteness restrictions in the accusative construction.