ABSTRACT
Putting aside the use of have as an auxiliary verb, itself a matter of enonnous typological interest, the use of this element and its equivalents in expressing possession represents an area of impressive cross-linguistic morpho-syntactic diversity. One popular type of possessive predication (x has y) is expressed by a suffixal noun in Warlpiri (of Central Australia) and by null (zero, nothing) in 'O'odham (Pima-Papago of Arizona and Sonora), by a verb in English, by a preposition-like verb in Yoruba, by a true preposition in Bantu, and by a verbal suffix in Hopi. This diversity is underlain by an extremely simple system of structural relations. In an important sense, there is but one have. The observed cross-linguistic variation in the expression of the predicational relation involved here can be attributed to the flexibility which is inherent in the language-specific morpholexical realization of universal lexical and functional categories (the parts of speech). The underlying structural categories themselves are invariant, but their overt expression is highly variable. We will be concerned with diversity as much as, perhaps more than, with universal aspects of linguistic expressions in the domain at issue. In this, we wish to recognize our friend Frits Staal, who has contributed greatly to our appreciation of linguistic diversity.
