Re: Translation pattern of 'to have'?
| From: | Herman Miller <hmiller@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, March 5, 2001, 4:12 |
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On Sun, 4 Mar 2001 12:08:17 -0500, Zach May <zachmay@...> wrote:
>Some of the other phrases in question, "We're having a good time." for
>example, seem, to me atleast, to be just idiomatic usage of "to have." In
>the case of "We're having a good time," I don't believe any possessing is
>going on at all, making it rather irrelevant to the thread. Further, the...
>umm, how should I put it... "dirty" interpretation of "having a dog", is
>also pretty idiomatic. I wouldn't worry about that either.
>
>Well... my first real post. Whew. I hope I don't sound like an idiot! :p
>
>- Zach May.
I think the part of that sentence that's idiomatic is "a good time". But
other words and idiomatic phrases can be used with "have/having" in that
way:
fun
difficulty, trouble, problems, etc.
a bath, a shower, etc.
a nice day (often as an imperative "Have a nice day!")
a bad day
a nightmare
the time of one's life
a heart attack
In some of these expressions, "having" can be replaced with "experiencing".
On the other hand, the usage of "have" associated with possession typically
doesn't allow the imperfective form "having" (*I'm having a Compaq Presario
laptop). Also note that various kinds of modifiers can be added, and word
order is flexible: "having a very good time", "what fun we had", "was that
a heart attack I was having?". I'm not sure if I'd go so far as to call
them different verbs that happen to sound the same (and also happen to have
the same irregularities, "has" and "had"), but at least they're two
grammatically distinct usages of the same word.
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