# Analysis of Existential Clauses Denoting Possession



## 123xyz

Numerous languages across the world lack a verb that can be directly translated as "to have" and instead use existential constructions with verbs that are more analogous to the verb "to be" or with adjectives comparable to adjectives such as "existent". In relation to this, I am wondering how such clauses can be analysed syntactically, in terms of subjects and objects. In languages where there is an active verb denoting possession, such as the English "to have", the owner is the subject and the owned is the direct object. However, in languages where there is an existential construction, is there an object? Is the owned in fact a subject?

For example, in Hungarian, one may say "van egy barátom", meaning "I have a friend", which would literally translate to something like "is a friend-my", i.e. "a friend of mine exists" or something such. Likewise, in Russian, one may say "у меня есть друг", meaning the same, literally translating to something like "in me is friend". In these types of sentences, can one say that the "owned", i.e. "friend" in this case, is the grammatical subject of the sentence? Does the subject logic even apply here? In both the examples, the words for friend are in the respective languages' nominative cases, so I suppose it would make sense to denote them as subjects. However, given the meanings of the sentences, I am not sure if they have a subject-like role semantically.

That aside, what brought my attention to this matter is the analysis of "var" structures in Turkish in a thread on the Turkish forum:



> 1. [Hikmet'in dört yaşında bir oğlu var] is : _Hikmet *has* a 4-year-old son.
> *
> [...]
> 
> *The age and the name together are the *object* for Hikmet and the verb "to have"..._
> 
> 
> Here, the age and the name are analysed as the object of to "have". Indeed, in English, they are the object of "to have", but Turkish has no verb meaning "to have" - Turks use an existential construction. They don't say "I have a son", they say "*there is a son to me". Thus, how can we speak of an object of "to have" in Turkish? The sentence "Hikmet'in dört yaşında oğlu var" literally translates to *to Hikmet a four-year-old son exists/is". That would make "oğlu" a subject. Hence, the argument about "Hikmet'in dört yaşındaki oğlu var" being incorrect because of objects being involved makes little sense to me...



Namely, it was ultimately explained to me that "var" structures have an object. It was explained that in the relevant example, "oğlu" is the object, while I had proposed that it is a subject, i.e. the one "existing":



> [...]
> They don't say "I have a son", they say "*there is a son to me". Thus, how can we speak of an object of "to have" in Turkish?Just by using possessive adjective with the possessor + the verb "var".
> The sentence "Hikmet'in dört yaşında oğlu var" literally translates to *to Hikmet a four-year-old son exists/is".No, never. Just Hikmet *has* a 4-year-old son.
> That would make "oğlu" a subject.No, in the sentence "Hikmet'in dört yaşında oğlu var", oğlu is not subject but an object (of the verb "var": Neyi var? Büyük bir evi var, kırmızı arabası var, 4 yaşında oğlu var.) Hence, the argument about "Hikmet'in dört yaşındaki oğlu var" being incorrect because of objects being involved makes little sense to me.In this sentence oğlu is subject because the verb "var" means "exists".
> [...]



I don't quite understand the logic about the objects being expressed with the possessive suffixes. It appears to me that applying an appropriate suffix to the owner creates a genitive or dative (or the like) construction, depending on the language, which functions as a complement rather than a subject or object, whereas applying possessive suffixes to the owned/possessed is analogous to adding modifiers rather than altering the syntactical role on the sentence.

Thus, what are your views on the matter? Do existential clauses indicating possession in general have objects or merely subjects (or something third), and does it vary across language?


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## learnerr

The general answer for all languages cannot exist, but...


123xyz said:


> Likewise, in Russian, one may say "у меня есть друг", meaning the same, literally translating to something like "in me is friend".


This translation does not make sense, as you can see. However, what is interesting is that Russian allows for many prepositions depending on where the thing exists. The most common and by default preposition is the one used in your sentence, «у», which translates to something like "at", and thus the literal translation is "at me is a friend" and makes complete sense (actually, I have even seen sometimes how English may indeed use words in this way). But other prepositions are also current, so one, being imaginative, can as well say «во мне есть друг» ("in me is a friend"), meaning that inside his soul or his body there is someone else who is his friend.


> In these types of sentences, can one say that the "owned", i.e. "friend" in this case, is the grammatical subject of the sentence?


Certainly, because the thing is not the "owned", but the "existent", where "existent", as always, means "being important for our courses of thought".


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## learnerr

An attempt for a more general answer: I think what is in common among all kinds of "existential" marking of having is that in all of them, what indicates and bears the sense of having _is not a verb_, but anything else: in Russian, this is a preposition (most generally, the preposition «у»), in Hungarian and Turkish, this is an agglutinative marker of possession (there is no substantial difference between saying, 'a house is mine', and 'I have a house', is it?), in some other languages (Latin?), this may be a word showing the beneficiary of the possession (let's say, a word in the dative case), and in some other languages this may be simply a word in the genitive case (in Russian, this approach is sometimes taken, but quite not often enough to get into coursebooks). As for the verb, it may even not be used in such statements, as is often the case in Russian, but in case it happens to be used, it needs in such cases to be as void of meaning as possible, for generality of expression and because all sense needed was already expressed, so, in the most general case (in Russian, not always! if the context makes it possible, other verbs will be used with the preposition), it turns out to be a word with the meaning 'exist', most preferably with such variation of this meaning that is most cleared of any additional ideas. This meaning is indeed really void: just for the fact that it was mentioned, any thing exists.

That was the analysis of meaning. As for parts of sentence, these classifications are man-made and thus language-dependent and, possibly, school-dependent. No need to pay excessive attention to them, they are not part of the nature of the things.


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## 123xyz

Thank you for the reply, it is very informative. 



> As for parts of sentence, these classifications are man-made and thus language-dependent and, possibly, school-dependent. No need to pay excessive attention to them, they are not part of the nature of the things.



Quite so. 

However, if we aren't only looking at syntactical analyses of existential clauses within individual languages but are trying to establish some common pattern that can be applied across multiple languages, I suppose that the artificial classifications (school-dependent) don't really matter - if we can establish that all the example sentences I provided are structurally parallel (i.e. in their nature), that wouldn't be directly connected to what to type (i.e. an artificial designation) of structure is in question . Thus, in regard to my confusion about the proposed objects in the Turkish "var" structure, would it be plausible to say that "bir arkadaşım var" is structurally parallel to "у меня есть друг" i.e. that all the corresponding parts are equivalent, even though they are upon convention analysed differently in terms of subjects and objects within the respective languages?


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## Rallino

Strictly speaking, the Turkish_ var_ doesn't mean _exists_, it means_ is existant_. Therefore, _var_ is an adjective, which means, it's the predicate of the sentence. Whereas the Russian _есть_ is the 3rd person singular conjugation of _быть_: (я есмь, ты еси, он *есть*).

In Turkish:
*X var.* is translated as: _There is X_. However, literally speaking, it says: _X is existant, _which automatically makes _X_ the subject of the sentence.
*X+im*_(possessive suffix)_* var*. is translated as: _I have X. _Literally speaking, it says: _My X_ _is existant_, which, thus, makes _My X_ the subject of the sentence.

The Russian sentence _у меня есть машина_ is possible in Turkish, albeit considered street talk: _bende araba var_. "At me car is existant" (as opposed to _arabam var _- "My car is existant"). In both sentences, _araba_ "car" is the subject. It's the one that is existant. 

If we wanted to create a Russian sentence that is parallel to the Turkish one, _Arabam var_ would be *Moя машина есть*. or even *Моя машина имеющаясь.*, since the Turkish sentence doesn't have a verb.

In any case, none of the Turkish sentences above have an object.


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## sakvaka

123xyz said:


> Thus, what are your views on the matter? Do existential clauses indicating possession in general have objects or merely subjects (or something third), and does it vary across language?



In Finnish, the possessive clause in indicative present is expressed like this:

[OWNER in adessive] + _on_ + [OWNED THING in nominative, accusative or partitive]

Eg. 
_Minulla on kirja_. lit. 'On/by me is a book.'
_Minulla ei ole ystävää. _lit. 'On/by me is not a friend.'
_Minulla on kaksi kirjaa._ lit. 'On/by me is two books.'

Note particularly that _on_ (the 3rd person singular of _olla_, 'to be') doesn't follow the number of what some authors would call the logical subject of the clause. Also, the fact that in some cases the last word can be in the accusative case (eg. _Onneksi minulla on sinut!_ I'm glad I have you!) makes the subject interpretation even less convincing.

For more information, see eg. the Big Finnish grammar, § 923.


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## Gavril

123xyz said:


> Thank you for the reply, it is very informative.
> 
> 
> 
> Quite so.
> 
> However, if we aren't only looking at syntactical analyses of existential clauses within individual languages but are trying to establish some common pattern that can be applied across multiple languages, I suppose that the artificial classifications (school-dependent) don't really matter - if we can establish that all the example sentences I provided are structurally parallel (i.e. in their nature), that wouldn't be directly connected to what to type (i.e. an artificial designation) of structure is in question . Thus, in regard to my confusion about the proposed objects in the Turkish "var" structure, would it be plausible to say that "bir arkadaşım var" is structurally parallel to "у меня есть друг" i.e. that all the corresponding parts are equivalent, even though they are upon convention analysed differently in terms of subjects and objects within the respective languages?



The parallel (or a parallel) between these two structures is that the possessed item is the new information of the sentence, and also the subject (in terms of verb agreement) of the sentence.

In structures like English _I have a friend, _the noun-phrase "a friend" has a similar status of new information, even if the verb agrees with "I" in this case rather than "friend".


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## learnerr

Gavril said:


> The parallel (or a parallel) between these two structures is that the possessed item is the new information of the sentence, and also the subject (in terms of verb agreement) of the sentence.


If you're comparing the Russian and the Turkish structures, then in the Russian prepositional construction the possessed term is not always the new information.
- У кого собака?
- У меня собака.

'Who owns a dog?'. - 'I do.'
'Who took care of this/that/my/his dog?' - 'I did.'

Both are indeed subjects, but in Turkish not in terms of verb agreement, and even in Russian not really in these terms, since "есть" in modern Russian, first, does not conjugate (never in person and seldom in number), second, is so very often non-existent in sentences. I think, the fact that the owned things are grammatical subjects is the only common trait of structure; maybe some subtle feature of meaning also follows from this trait, like their position depends on their nature, possibly.


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## Gavril

learnerr said:


> If you're comparing the Russian and the Turkish structures, then in the Russian prepositional construction the possessed term is not always the new information.



Would you say that it's new information in the large majority of cases?

For example, if someone needed a hammer to do a certain job, and asked a surrounding crowd of people, _"Does anyone *have* a hammer I could borrow?"_, how (in Russian) would you normally answer that person saying that you (new information) had a hammer? (And, would it be possible to omit the word "hammer" in your answer?)



> Both are indeed subjects, but in Turkish not in terms of verb agreement, and even in Russian not really in these terms, since "есть" in modern Russian, first, does not conjugate (never in person and seldom in number), second, is so very often non-existent in sentences.


 
I stand corrected. But in the absence of morphological agreement, I'm uncertain whether we can, in fact, call the possessed item a "subject" in the Russian and Turkish constructions. Apart from agreement, I don't how to define "subject" in a way that's independent of information structure (new vs. old information, etc.).


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## learnerr

Gavril said:


> Would you say that it's new information in the large majority of cases?


Hard to count, sorry. 


> For example, if someone needed a hammer to do a certain job, and asked a surrounding crowd of people, _"Does anyone *have* a hammer I could borrow?"_, how (in Russian) would you normally answer that person saying that you (new information) had a hammer? (And, would it be possible to omit the word "hammer" in your answer?)


- У кого-нибудь есть молоток?
- У меня есть.
"Есть" can be, or not be, omitted. "Молоток" in the answer is almost always omitted, but can be said as well.

If you think you know where is your hammer, you might say:
- Молоток у тебя?
- Ага.
- Передай, пожалуйста.
In the reverse word order ("у тебя молоток?") it works, too.


> I stand corrected. But in the absence of morphological agreement, I'm uncertain whether we can, in fact, call the possessed item a "subject" in the Russian and Turkish constructions. Apart from agreement, I don't how to define "subject" in a way that's independent of information structure (new vs. old information, etc.).


As for Russian, that depends on meaning, partly, and also it is important that the name for the owned thing goes in the nominative case. Still a matter of convention, I reckon. If we ask ourselves, what part of the sentence "Собака бежала по дороге, погналась за кошкой, но не догнала её" does the word "хомяк" in "у меня есть хомяк" remind most of all, then it is certainly "собака". As for Turkish, I guess that the role of a word that is predicated by an adjective must be a subject, as Rallino said.


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## Gavril

learnerr said:


> - У кого-нибудь есть молоток?
> - У меня есть.
> "Есть" can be, or not be, omitted. "Молоток" in the answer is almost always omitted, but can be said as well.
> 
> If you think you know where is your hammer, you might say:
> - Молоток у тебя?
> - Ага.
> - Передай, пожалуйста.



Both of these examples support the idea that there's a link (though not a perfect one) between the construction _У [...] есть [...]_ and the "new information" status of the possessed item.



> In the reverse word order ("у тебя молоток?") it works, too.



If you asked this question with the emphasis on _молоток_ (e.g., if you needed a hammer for a job), would the intonation be different than above?


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## learnerr

> If you asked this question with the emphasis on _молоток_ (e.g., if you needed a hammer for a job), would the intonation be different than above?


Yes. The emphasis must be on "тебя"; with the emphasis on "молоток" it means, do you hold a/the hammer or something else?


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## learnerr

learnerr said:


> Both are indeed subjects, but in Turkish not in  terms of verb agreement, and even in Russian not really in these terms,  since "есть" in modern Russian, first, does not conjugate (never in  person and seldom in number), second, is so very often non-existent in  sentences. I think, the fact that the owned things are grammatical  subjects is the only common trait of structure; maybe some subtle  feature of meaning also follows from this trait, like their position  depends on their nature, possibly.


Nearly forgot: in the past and the future tenses (у меня были, у  меня будут) there is verb agreement in Russian within this construction.  As for preferences towards the "new information" status, they may be  more a function of the question: when trying to get the uses in their  'purest' forms, we pay attention to details we don't really pay attention  to when talking. If I say, "у меня был дом", is "дом" a new or an old  information? That depends on what was discussed before, just that.
So, the answer is made by its question rather than belongs in the thing.


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## Gavril

learnerr said:


> As for preferences towards the "new information" status, they may be  more a function of the question: when trying to get the uses in their  'purest' forms, we pay attention to details we don't really pay attention  to when talking. If I say, "у меня был дом", is "дом" a new or an old  information? That depends on what was discussed before, just that.



Well, even if the house (дом) was mentioned before, был дом" would be new information, wouldn't it?

Of course, it's possible for both possessor and possessed to be new information ("A man had a house"), or for the possessor to be new and possessed to be old ("A man had the house"). However, at least in English, this relationship will often be reflected in the choice of words or syntax:

_*There was* a man who owned a house_
(new possessor introduced by "There is ...")

_*The house *was owned by *a man* I used to know._
(previously-mentioned possessed item precedes new possessor)

Since Russian has no articles, I wonder if word-order isn't even more commonly modified (compared to English) to express distinctions like the above?


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## learnerr

Gavril said:


> Well, even if the house (дом) was mentioned before, был дом" would be new information, wouldn't it?


That depends.  The difference between new information versus old information (let us ensure we mean the same thing) is that people either are invited to process new information on the base of what they know, or are reminded of something they know in order to build new thought. First, this distinction may be non-important. Second, I might well say, 'I had a house', exactly in order to build my tale further, assuming that those who listen to my story know I did have.


> Since Russian has no articles, I wonder if word-order wouldn't be even  more commonly modified (than in English) to express distinctions like  the above?


It could, or it could not. One note, however, is that in the existential construction the "new" possessor holding the "old" object tends to be not as new as to be unknown (verbs of possession are used instead). Still, this is nothing of a hard rule, you may well say, "Дом был у Миши Грицко" without ever saying who was Misha Gritsko. Or, "У Миши Грицко был дом", if you find his person non-important. This is with houses; if you mean something more operative, like paint, then "У Миши Грицко была краска" is very fine when you describe how the work was organised, and "краска была у Миши Грицко" is very fine when you describe where was the paint. Now, how to classify whether the paint is "new" or "old"? In the first case, this is more a "philosophical" question than an inquiry into the things. In the second case, the sentence supposes that the paint is "old".


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## Gavril

learnerr said:


> That depends.  The difference between new information versus old information (let us ensure we mean the same thing) is that people either are invited to process new information on the base of what they know, or are reminded of something they know in order to build new thought.



"Old information" (as I'm using the term) = information that is known by the listener and speaker already

"New information" = information that is not yet known (at least by the listener), or that has been forgotten in the current context



> First, this distinction may be non-important. Second, I might well say, 'I had a house', exactly in order to build my tale further, assuming that those who listen to my story know I did have.



 If someone says "I have a house" twice to the same person, that tells me the speaker thinks the listener needs (or might need) to be reminded of this fact, so the fact is being treated as new information in both cases.



> It could, or it could not. One note, however, is that in the existentional construction the "new" possessor holding the "old" object tends to be not as new as to be unknown (verbs of possession are used instead). Still, this is nothing of a hard rule, you may well say, "Дом был у Миши Грицко" without ever saying who was Misha Gritsko. Or, "У Миши Грицко был дом", if you find his person non-important. This is with houses; if you mean something more operative, like paint, then "У Миши Грицко была краска" is very fine when you describe how the work was organised, and "краска была у Миши Грицко" is very fine when you describe where was the paint.



Again, there may not be a perfect correlation between syntactic position and newness of information (maybe the "salience" of the information is more fundamental to word order), but that doesn't mean that no solid correlation exists.



> Now, how to classify whether the paint is "new" or "old"?



You could check whether paint was mentioned in a recent sentence or not.


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## learnerr

Gavril said:


> If someone says "I have a house" twice to the same person, that tells me the speaker thinks the listener needs (or might need) to be reminded of this fact, so the fact is being treated as new information in both cases.


It may be not said twice (the listener may just know that the speaker has the house, and the speaker may know that the listener knows it), and repetition of something that the other person knows does not mean the speaker thinks the other person should be reminded of something forgotten. It may be just a way to start a story, for example. 'As you know, months ago I had a house, a family, and a job'.


> You could check whether paint was mentioned in a recent sentence or not.


Well, it may be implied, that when you are making this kind of work, you need a paint. So, the listener may know it. Whether he knows, the sentence does not specify in this case.


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## Gavril

learnerr said:


> It may be not said twice (the listener may just know that the speaker has the house, and the speaker may know that the listener knows it), and repetition of something that the other person knows does not mean the speaker thinks the other person should be reminded of something forgotten. It may be just a way to start a story, for example. 'As you know, months ago I had a house, a family, and a job'.



Hmm, I don't know -- whenever I see/hear a sentence in normal discourse, I imagine that the speaker thinks that at least *someone* might need to be informed or reminded of the information in that sentence.

This may not apply to subordinate clauses-- e.g., _*The fact that I had a house* was no longer important_ -- but if _I had a house_ is the main clause of a sentence, then I feel as though it must be being treated as (potentially) new information. I think that "As you know ..." is really short for "As you know (but may not recall at this moment)".

The only exceptions I can think of are cases where the speaker reminds the listener of what the speaker knows. E.g., if a boss tells his employee, _"I need that report by Friday!"_ in a certain tone of voice, he may assume that the employee knows this fact, but thinks he can get away with ignoring it.

(We're getting a bit off-topic; maybe this should be split off into a new thread starting at post #17.)


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## learnerr

Gavril said:


> Hmm, I don't know -- whenever I see/hear a sentence in normal discourse, I imagine that the speaker thinks that at least *someone* might need to be informed or reminded of the information in that sentence.


There was a scene in Harry Potter novels, "The Order of the Phoenix", where prof. Dumbledore begins his story of observations over Harry Potter's life by telling to him that he recognised a sign of the connection between Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort. (The penultimate chapter). Both of them surely know that Harry knows that at the moment of saying the words, but still, Dumbledore is starting the story this way in order to have a good base for the telling. This is not the only way of using sentences without wishing to communicate anything new; there are many more instances – for example, in chatting.

I think we had started a new topic not now, but way before, in the #13, when we started to discuss whether the question of marking new versus old information is applicable in the general case; I hold that this question is non-applicable to some (many? the phrase about the paint was one example) kinds of sentences and constructions, and also that its answer is not guaranteed to be an internal property of a sentence or a construction; so, posing this question may lead to illusions of inquiry, when the inquiry itself creates its own object. I think there is more to say on this topic, but I agree that this topic would belong to a separate thread...


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## Gavril

learnerr said:


> There was a scene in Harry Potter novels, "The Order of the Phoenix", where prof. Dumbledore begins his story of observations over Harry Potter's life by telling to him that he recognised a sign of the connection between Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort. (The penultimate chapter). Both of them surely know that Harry knows that at the moment of conversation, but still, Dumbledore is starting the story this way in order to have a good base for the telling.



I don't know the specific sentence(s) you're talking about, but I'd think that it would be very hard (without cues such as tone of voice) to determine whether the speaker is sure that what he's saying is known to the listener, and whether every detail is fresh in the listener's (short-term) memory. People often need to be reminded of things, even things they were recently told, because of the limitations on how much we can be thinking of at any given moment.

As far as I can see, a "base for the telling" is a base of information that the listener needs to know to understand what follows. If the "base" in question is purely stylistic, then the speaker is not engaging in normal discourse (as I think of it).



> This is not the only way of using sentences without wishing to communicate anything new; there are many more instances – for example, in chatting.



When I'm chatting, I might accidentally say something without thinking about whether it was already known to the listener, but I don't think I would intentionally say something that I knew added no new info to the conversation.



> I think we had started a new topic not now, but way before, in the #13, when we started to discuss whether the question of marking new versus old information is applicable in the general case;



I don't think so, because this question was still germane (to some extent) to the original question of similarities/differences among possessive constructions.


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## learnerr

Gavril said:


> I don't know the specific sentence(s) you're talking about, but I'd think that it would be very hard (without cues such as tone of voice) to determine whether the speaker is sure that what he's about to say is known to the listener, and whether every detail is fresh in the listener's (short-term) memory. People often need to be reminded of things, even things they were recently told, because of the limitations on how much we can be thinking of at any given moment.


Harry Potter answers explicitly that he knows that, and Dumbledore agrees that Harry does, but he says that he feels necessary to begin his explanation this way. So, this is all very explicit. At least, in the Russian translation it is, yet I can't see any reason why it might be different in the original.


> As far as I can see, a "base for the telling" is a base of information that the listener needs to know to understand what follows. If the "base" in question is purely stylistic, then the speaker is not engaging in normal discourse (as I think of it).


The base in question is purely stylistic, but it is indeed what the listener needs to know in order to understand the matter; yet he knows this base anyway, told or not told, there is no "reminding" that changes his state of knowledge. Maybe he is not currently thinking of it, so the speaker needs to fix that. And yes, for me it is normal discourse that is subject to interest; maybe more interest than much constrained language that is used for jobs. Why it is or why it is not is a different question.


> When I'm chatting, I might accidentally say something without thinking about whether it was already known to the listener, but I don't think I would intentionally say something that I knew added no new info to the conversation.


Why? 'It rains today'. Quite a normal phrase for chatting, even if both walk in the street or look out of the window. I was often amazed at statements that "language is only a means of communication", given that I see that so often it serves other purposes, and that these other purposes show themselves more generic than the one of simply transmission of information suitable for doing jobs. But this, too, is a different, more general, topic.


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## Gavril

learnerr said:


> The base in question is purely stylistic, but it is indeed what the listener needs to know in order to understand the matter; but he knows this base anyway, told or not told, there is no "reminding" that changes his state of knowledge. Maybe he is not currently thinking of it, so the speaker needs to fix that.



This (i.e, mentioning something that the speaker is not currently thinking of) would fall under what I call "reminding". It's meant to draw a listener's attention to something that wasn't in his immediate consciousness (and is therefore more than just stylistic).



> Why? 'It rains today'. Quite a normal phrase for chatting, even if both walk in the street or look out of the window.



I wouldn't say (or expect someone else to say) "It's raining today" to someone who could already see it was raining, unless I was actually trying to draw attention to something else: e.g.,

- "It's raining today [and to think that the weather forecast predicted sun all week!]"

- "It's raining today [so we won't be able to go fishing as we'd hoped]"


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## ThomasK

I have only been able to have a quick look at this, but as for the grammar question, I wonder whether it is really relevant. 

I thought of other angles: 
- frame semantics (not quite sure this is FS): is the relationship expressed really the same? It seems equivalent to me, but... (I suppose it is hard to decide on whether it is the same, or equivalent)
- pragmatics: I think in _have _sentences the owner/... gets more focus (emphasis), is maybe more 'marked' than the owner


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## learnerr

Gavril said:


> This (i.e, mentioning something that the speaker is not currently thinking of) would fall under what I call "reminding". It's meant to draw a listener's attention to something that wasn't in his immediate consciousness (and is therefore more than just stylistic).


But then, every word is used (or misused) exactly to make people think of something.
It may pass unnoticed in many situations, but it is very important, for example, in literature, especially in fine poetry. Also, it may be important in casual talk when the point of talking is not to exchange truths, but something else. That is what _choice of style_ is all about: to ensure that properly selected words make readers think of a collection of things that is useful for their minds in a certain way (the critiques call it, "построение художественного образа", "construction of an artistic image", not sure how it is translated). It may even be unconscious sometimes.
I see the point of assuming the listener is not currently thinking of the thing that he needs to consider in order to understand the matter; but I did not feel this concern as main there, to me it was very tangential. How do we know whether the listener is, or is not thinking of something? People think of so many things at the same time.


> I wouldn't say (or expect someone else to say) "It's raining today" to someone who could already see it was raining, unless I was actually trying to draw attention to something else


Maybe it is a cultural thing, maybe it is just personal. For me it is normal that one might say to another, "Надо же, дождь идёт" in the meaning "see how beautiful" or "see how boring"; the phrase feels best of all if the two are thinking of the rain at the same time.


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## learnerr

learnerr said:


> The base in question is purely stylistic, but it is indeed what the listener needs to know in order to understand the matter


As for such start-story knowledge: it was indeed important for some understanding, but not for understanding of reasons, making decisions, or evaluating truth. We could not get a part of this knowledge and say: this was the important point. Rather, it was important as the whole, as a context, and for what? for better feeling the story.


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## learnerr

learnerr said:


> Second, I might well say, 'I had a house', exactly in order to build my tale further, assuming that those who listen to my story know I did have.


I agree, though, that this sentence with such meaning would hardly ever appear in live talking. But in a short story this sentence (no part of it is "new") might very well appear, thus making a case and an example. It just appears to me that to discuss categories of meaning that are not internal properties of expressions is a pointless task, this is what I wanted to mean.


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## Gavril

learnerr said:


> I agree, though, that this sentence with such meaning would hardly ever appear in live talking. But in a short story this sentence (no part of it is "new") might very well appear,



I wouldn't expect to see it used in an English short story if the information wasn't new to the immediate context. Perhaps in older storytelling practices, sentences could be used with some sort of ritualistic purpose in mind -- i.e., independently of whether they informed the listener of anything new -- but this isn't a feature of English-language prose (or speech) as I know it.

One of the things that separates poetry from prose in my understanding is that in poetry, this kind of requirement for contributing information is relaxed: for example, you can repeat sentences in immediate succession, and you won't be seen as having violated any important convention.


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## Gavril

> , the use of "empty thus making a case and an example. It just appears to me that to discuss categories of meaning that are not internal properties of expressions is a pointless task, this is what I wanted to mean.



I'm not always sure how to reliably label a given property as "inherent" to a given expression, and I think the requirement of "inherentness" is sometimes overstated. To go back to the earlier topic of discussion, the "new vs. old information" contrast doesn't determine the syntax of *all* existential clauses (Russian _u menya est'_, etc.), but I suspect that it is common enough to influence the word order of these clauses. By contrast, it isn't clear that the category of "subject" (defined independently of information structure) is inherent to such clauses at all, at least not in every language.


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## learnerr

Gavril said:


> I'm not always sure how to reliably label a given property as "inherent" to a given expression, and I think the requirement of "inherentness" is sometimes overstated.


Absolutely reliably probably in no way, but we can, by studying examples, establish, for example, that whenever the word "my" is used, there is something that is related to me above all and that I need to act with (my cows, my trophy, my problems, my agony); this happens automatically and, in this sense, must be inherent to the word "my". The problems may begin when we invent some property first (by making speculation about how the mind should work, for example) and only then try to apply it to expressions. It is possible that the speculated property is not independent in some way of the automatic properties of the expression; we may notice this dependency, but its nature (in what way?) remains unknown, so maybe the dependency turns out to be of little interest.


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## learnerr

To continue with the subtopic of prepositional constructions of having, some peculiarities of the Russian language, at random:
1. In, at least, two proverbs that we have in our language saved from the past, there presents itself the preposition "о" in the same function:
"Конь о четырёх ногах, да и то спотыкается" – "The horse has four legs, yet he stumbles all the same"
"Всякая палка о двух концах" – "Every stick has two ends"
Note that in these constructions the possessor is in the nominative case and is the subject of the clause. The possessee takes the locative case.
2. I already mentioned that in Russian the noun phrase of such construction is not necessarily composed with the preposition "у", and the "possessee" part does not necessarily contain the verb "exist" together with the word for the possessed thing, but it may as well contain something else that would suit better the context. What I did not mention is that there is a preposition for the noun phrase that is quasi-synonymous with "у", "при", i.e. it bears some sense of control that is associated with possession and also bears the sense of being near something, an example: "бумаги при мне" ("I have the papers with me"), "при мне деньги" (this can mean: "I have money, I can use money", but also "I took money with me"). The possessor is in the dative case. Another thing that I did not mention is that the "possessee" part may as well be a complete sentence or a phrase: "у меня сын получил двойку за экзамен", "my son got a bad mark for his exam"; "у меня кончился бензин", "I ran out of gas".
3. By the way, that "при" construction may also work in reverse: "я при деньгах" means "I have money", too. Here the possessor is the subject, and the possessee is in the locative case.
4. When there is some real sense of possession, Russian prefers to use the corresponding verbs ("владеть" – "я владею домом"; "принадлежать" – "дом принадлежит мне") or the possessive adjectives/pronouns ("мой", "его"). I wonder whether this is universal across languages that usually do not use verbs to mean that something has something, and possibly prefer prepositional constructions.


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## berndf

*Moderator note: Thread moved to EHL.*


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