This site © 2007 by the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, CB3 9DP
Andrzej Łęcki
University of Silesia, Poland
Email: leckiandrzej at go2 dot pl
This paper explores the origin of causative HAVE in English. The focus of attention here are two types of causative HAVE structures: NP 1 + HAVE + NP 2 + past participle and NP 1 + HAVE + NP 2 + infinitive + NP 3. The development of causative HAVE has not attracted much attention from historical linguists. Apart from Baron (1977), Kim (2001) and Hollmann (2003), it is hard to find any account of the development of English causative HAVE elsewhere – even Visser (1963-1973 [2002]: 2269f.) barely adduces some examples of the construction without providing any motivation behind its growth. Similarly, in grammaticalisation literature this development has been neglected; Heine & Kuteva (2002: 241, 324), for example, among four different grammaticalisation channels of H-POSSESSIVE (‘have’ > EXIST, FUTURE, OBLIGATION, PERFECT) make no mention of the ‘have’ > causative grammaticalisation path (the sources of the causative grammatical markers they supply are ‘do’, ‘give’ and ‘take’ (p. 328)).
The omission of ‘have’ from the ‘have’-into-causative path in Heine & Kuteva’s (2002) compilation of possible grammaticalisation channels might stem from the fact that this development seems to be quite exceptional. At the same time, it needs to be noted that causative HAVE in English has been grammaticalised only at the minimum in that it could be treated as an idiomatic use of HAVE rather than as an auxiliary because it virtually does not exhibit any NICE properties, nor are any signs of erosion or fusion visible. Hence, in the case of the English causative periphrasis with HAVE, we can only speak of the initial levels of grammaticalisation, i.e. pragmatic-semantic, while morphosyntactic and phonological changes do not seem to have particularly affected the construction.
It is hypothesised that the causative structure with a past participle is an offshoot of the stative/resultative HAVE construction developed through evoking contextual implicatures in which the referent of NP 1 is in a superior position enabling the referent to cause an action to be performed by giving instructions and inviting the addressee to infer the causative meaning of the proposition. This process took place already in Old English and could be facilitated by the presence of experiential HAVE of the same surface structure as the stative and causative periphrases. As for causative HAVE making use of an infinitive, I advocate the view that it developed in the fourteenth century through such structures as HAVE of experience and indirect passive HAVE. Additionally, the path of grammaticalisation of the causative HAVE periphrasis might have been smoothed by the presence of other types of complements that Middle English HAVEN could take, e.g. adjectival and prepositional phrases and especially past participles, as well as analogical causative structures employing MAKEN ‘make’ and LETAN ‘let’.
References