Unified Syntactic Analysis Of HAVE Paradigm

The primary goal of Chomskyan's Minimalist Program is an explanation of language phenomena and unveiling of the nature of language. Base upon this purpose, this dissertation is a case study of HAVE paradigm, discovering that a certain variety of surface structures is reducible to the interaction of a single underlying structure and independently established principles. It will shed a great deal of light on other languages in this respect, thereby reducing to independently established principles of Universal Grammar (UG), by dealing with the variety of uses and the properties of the verb HAVE in English.In the remainder of this dissertation, I strongly argue for a 'least effort' theory of alternative minimalist Decompositional Approach to HAVE and its representatives, Benveniste, Freeze, and Kayne. Via the concrete application, I argue that HAVE has such properties as: (1) Besides Phonetic Form, Logical Form also participates in the assignment of meaning to particular words; (2) All types of HAVE are essentially the same, that is, there is only one "verb" HAVE; consequently, the various interpretations of HAVE are derived from the syntactic structure. The wide range of interpretations available for HAVE arise precisely because its meaning is not fixed at the level of Phonetic Form; (3) Decompositional Approach to HAVE, which makes possible a unified analysis of HAVE paradigm, allows a single lexical item to have unique representations in the lexicon. The primary finding is that all HAVE constructions seem to have essentially the same structural derivation corresponding to P + BE; they differ in that HAVE has different substructures as the specifier of PP complement, combined with semantic and pragmatic constraints.