The East Slavic ‘HAVE’: between the be- and have-patterning? Andrii Danylenko Pace University (New York) adanylenko@pace.edu 1. Introduction (Meillet, Bally, Kuryłowicz, Vendryes, Ginneken, Mrázek) Common assumptions: o Gk. V÷ù, Lat. habeō, Goth. haba, Lith. turiù, Sl. imamь (< *jimami) and the like could have entered the grammar of late dialectal areas of IE (Meillet 1923) o Such verbs stem from transitive verbs with the general meaning ‘hold, grasp’ (Isačenko 1974) o All modern European languages are polarized into two groups, have- and be- languages have-languages transitional languages be-languages English Finnish German Estonian Dutch Hungarian French Czech Polish Slovak Ukrainian Russian Serbian/Croatian Belarusian Slovene Lithuanian, etc. (Isačenko 1974; Justus 1999a, 1999b) o Among the Slavic languages, Russian is the only solid be-language Justus (1999a, 77) argued that the older be-type predicate of possession is “still found in Sanskrit and Russian”: (1) a. R u (at) menja (I-gen.) est’ (is) mašina (car-nom.) ‘I have a car’ b. L mihi (I-dat) est ‘to me is’ o From the early 18th c. onward under the influence of German and French, imět’ ‘have’ penetrates into the language of the Russian élite in numerous phraseologims and is firmly established in literary Russian by the end of the 18th c. The verb penetrated into Russian vernacular one century later čestь iměju ‘I have the honor’ iměetъ izrjadnoe položenie ‘[the room] has an excellent situation’ imětь xorošij vidъ ‘look good’ (Grammatica Russica by Michael Groening, 1750, cited in Isačenko 1974)