No HAVEs to GIVE? No problem! On the Lack of Asymmetries between Ditransitive 3 Constructions in Slavic Have vs. Be Languages

Abstract

This paper explores a correlation, due to by Harley (2002), that only languages of the world that express predicative possession with a transitive verb akin to English have (i.e., languages with P_HAVE that incorporates into BE in her terms) are languages which allow double object constructions. We sfocus on Polish a language (a HAVE language) and Russian (a BE-language) and show that the distinction between HAVE and BE languages and the availability of P_HAVE does not necessarily affect the properties (or existence) of double object constructions. We next turn to another potential diagnostic for the presence of a PP in a DOC, due to Bondarenko (2018) and involving the availability of restitutive readings in DOCs. We show that  Polish and Russian behave alike and both lack restitutive readings in DOCs, which suggests that the presence of a PP/P_HAVE, which Polish has and Russian appears to lack, cannot be the factor responsible for restitutive readings