Licensing NPIs and licensing silence: Have/be yet to in English Stephanie Harves a, * , Neil Myler b a Department of Linguistics, New York University, United States b Department of Linguistics, Boston University, United States Received 5 April 2013; received in revised form 11 April 2014; accepted 22 May 2014 Available online Abstract This paper discusses the syntax of the have/be yet to construction in English, as in John has/is yet to eat dinner. As pointed out by Kelly (2008), this construction raises a number of questions. How is the NPI yet licensed? Why is have interpreted as a perfect auxiliary verb, in spite of the fact that it appears to take an infinitival complement, rather than a perfect participle? What accounts for the apparent free alternation between have and be? We argue that have in the have yet to construction is, for many speakers, perfect have, which selects for a silent raising predicate that has negative implicative semantics. This predicate is responsible for licensing the NPI yet. We further show that the apparent free alternation between have yet to and be yet to is illusory. The category of the silent predicate can be shown to be different in each case in a way that is to be expected given independent c-selectional properties of have and be in English. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: NPIs; Yet; Negation; Have/be alternations 1. The puzzles Kelly (2008) points out several syntactic and semantic puzzles in regard to the constructions in (1), compared with their paraphrases in (2). (1) a. John has yet to eat dinner. b. John is yet to eat dinner. (2) a. John hasn’t eaten dinner yet. b. John didn’t eat dinner yet. The first puzzle regards the presence of yet in the sentences in (1). How is yet, a Negative Polarity Item (NPI), licensed? The paraphrases in (2) contain negation, so could it be that the sentences in (1) contain an instance of silent sentential negation? Second, we appear to have a clash between the syntax and the semantic interpretation of have here. That is, why do we see have to plus an infinitival complement in (1a) as opposed to have plus a perfect participle as in (2a)? Have to appears in English when the interpretation of have is modal, rather than the aspectual perfect, as in (3a). Could it be that www.elsevier.com/locate/lingua Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect Lingua 148 (2014) 213--239 * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: stephanie.harves@nyu.edu (S. Harves), myler@bu.edu (N. Myler). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2014.05.012 0024-3841/© 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.