Obligation and Possession

Henceforth, I will refer to the construction in (1b) as the Obligational Construction (OC) (= the construction used for possession + a non-finite verbal part). In this paper, I will discuss the question of why the same means are used for marking possession and obligation in many languages and provide a syntactic analysis of the obligational construction. The analysis proposed here derives the answer by treating obligational constructions as existential constructions, of which possessives can be seen as a special case (cf. Benveniste 1971, Freeze 1972, Kayne 1993, Hoekstra 1994 i.a.). One aspect of this analysis is that the modality of the obligational construction is not located in have; the semantic contribution ofhavein this analysis of the obligational construction is minimal. This is in line with recent analyses of possessive have(cf. Benveniste 1971, Freeze 1972, Kayne 1993, Hoekstra 1994 i.a.) and auxiliary have(cf. Kayne 1993 i.a.).