More on have and need

This paper addresses recent work on the cross-linguistic patterns involving have and need
predicates, focusing on the debate surrounding the claim that all languages that lack a tran-
sitive have also lack transitive need (Harves & Kayne 2012). In this paper, we move the
discussion beyond these surface patterns, first by presenting new syntactic diagnostics to
demonstrate that the Bantu language counter-examples to the proposed generalization dis-
cussed by Antonov & Jacques (2014) are true counter-examples to the original claim by
Harves & Kayne (2012). From this perspective, we evaluate the relevance of these conclu-
sions for Harves & Kayne (2012)’s lexical decomposition analysis of need. We conclude that
although Bantu languages form a straightforward counter-example to the proposed Harves
& Kayne (2012) typology, as Antonov & Jacques (2014) noted, there are in fact some deep
similarities between the Bantu patterns and the proposals of Harves & Kayne (2012). In
particular, we suggest that their observations about the role of case in the distribution of
have and need verbs may in fact be amenable to the Bantu patterns, suggesting that their
conclusions cannot yet be abandoned.