Relationship between possession ("to have") and tenses ("I have seen")

Question

In several Indo-European languages the verb that denotes possession (to have) is also used to construct verb tenses.

Some examples:

I have seen ... I have a dog. (English)

Am văzut ... Am un câine. (Romanian, am = I have. Note: this past tense in Romanian doesn't correspond directly to present perfect in English, but it's still an example of a tense formed with the equivalent to "to have".)

Έχω δει ... Έχω ένα σκύλο. (Greek, έχω = I have)

(And many others, such as Italian, French, Norwegian, etc. All sentences above have the same meaning, except for the noted difference in the precise tense.)

Since all of these languages are related, it is not that surprising that in all of them the verb to have shares these functions. I used to think that this is just an accidental idiosyncrasy of Indo-European languages, and there's no fundamental reason why it should be so.

But it turns out that Chinese (an unrelated language) is also like this:

我没(有)看到 ... 我有 一只狗。 (有 ^yǒu = have, 没有 ^{méi yǒu} = haven't)

Wǒ méi (yǒu) kàn dào... Wǒ yǒu yī zhi gǒu. (Meaning: I haven't seen ... I have a dog.)

Hungarian (my mother tongue) doesn't have anything like this (in fact it doesn't even have a verb for possession), so this double function of have is surprising and counterintuitive to me.

Question: Is there any fundamental reason why several unrelated languages would all use to have in these two seemingly separate and unrelated roles?

Answer 1

The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) provides information that is relevant to this question. Feature 68A (The Perfect) is divided into perfect from possessive (i.e. from have or the like), from finish or already, as well as a category for other perfects and one for languages that don't have a perfect.

The perfect from 'have' is relatively rare with only seven related and exclusively European languages. It developed from structures like I have the work done, which were later reanalysed as having the meaning of the perfect. Of course not all languages are part of WALS, but Mandarin is, and it is categorised as not having a perfect. I'm not saying that your example from Mandarin Chinese is wrong. It's possible - though perhaps a bit unlikely - that WALS is wrong, or that your example is not a perfect after all.

The perfect from 'finish' or 'already' is in fact more frequent, with 21 languages, and distributed over different language families.

Answer 2

Robert's answer leaves us with a puzzle. Since this construction of a perfect with "have" is so rare, it would be a very strange coincidence that it is present in French, German, English, Italian, etc. just by chance. The obvious solution would be to assume that this construction in those language appeared only once, in a language parent of these modern language, that is in Indo-European or at least some dialect of Indo-European of which those languages come form. However, an instant of reflexion shows that this solution does not work. In Latin, common ancestor of French and Italian, there was no composed perfect, in particular, no perfect with "have".

To solve this puzzle, the great French linguist A. Meillet has proposed that this construction of a perfect with "have" amongst the above said-language was developed only once, probably in germanic languages, and then transmitted not genetically, but laterally, that is by borrowing, into French, Italian, etc. This may seem surprising, as borrowing usually concerns words (mostly technical words), not whole grammatical structures. However, Meillet argues, this happened in a special situation, where an unusually large part of the population in western Europe was bilingual, speaking both a germanic language and a latin language: between the fifth and ninth or tenth century AD, after the invasion of the Roman empire by Germanic tribes. We can see everyday that bilingual people tends to borrow some grammatical or syntactic construction from one of their language to another (my daughter does that all the time, between English and French). It is thus plausible that if sufficiently many people in a country are bilingual, some grammatical construction (the perfect with "have") can be borrowed to one language to the other.

Answer 3

These analytical tense forms (perfect tenses) you refer to descend from free word combinations, only later, due to their frequent usage, they got gramaticalized and turned into the verb forms. Even now in English some traces of the expressions of have + Past Participle which are not a Perfect tense still can be found.

So, "I have written the letter." comes from the older "I have the letter written." (predicates are in bold type). This older form was something like today we can say "I have my car repaired." which is not the same now as "I have repaired my car." Generally speaking, the idea of Perfect is "as for now, the thing is done, I possess (hold in my hands, i.e. have) the thing made, the job finished."

Also note that some languages, like French and German, form the Perfect tenses from some verbs using 'to be', not 'to have', and all the Slavic languages originally had Perfect only with 'to be', never with 'to have'.

Answer 4

I'm not a linguist, but I am a Chinese native speaker.

The "have-perfect tense" in European languages is due to the European sprachbund, as described in other answers here and in Is it unusual that English uses possessive for past tense? As mentioned by others, this feature of using the possesive verb to describe the perfect tense is rare and doesn't seem to exist outside of European languages.

As for Chinese:

The use of 有(to have) as a sort of auxilary verb is not a really standard grammatical pattern and the resemblance to European languages is a coincidence.

I think sentences like your example 我没有看到 (lit. "I no-have seen" = I haven't seen) developed as answers to questions like 你有没有看到? (lit. "you have-not-have seen?" = have you seen?), which come from the use of the expression 有没有 (lit. "have-not-have" = "do [you] have?") as a generic question word.

In other words, it seems this grammatical construct emerged in Chinese because the expression "do you have?" evolved into a generic question word that could be attached to verbs as well as nouns.