Department of Linguistics
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003-7130
partee@linguist.umass.edu
www.umass.edu/linguist/faculty/partee.html
Landman and Partee (1987) offer a compositional account of existential
have-sentences with relational post-have NP's like those in (1), in which the
same definiteness restriction holds as in existential there-sentences.
a. John has a sister/ at most three sisters/ *every sister/ *most sisters.
b. Most happy people have many friends and few enemies.
The solution, due to Landman, is to analyze `a sister' as
lambda P lambda y[exists x[sister-of'(y)(x) & P(x)]],
and 'have' as
lambda R[R(lambda z[z = z])],
R of type <<e,t>,<e,t>.
We show how this solution accounts for the data and relates existential
have-sentences to existential there-sentences. The predicate lambdaz[z = z] is
derived as an existentially quantified missing coda.
Motivation for the type of the post-have NP is sought by comparing this
analysis to Szabolcsi's analysis of Hungarian existential have-sentences.