haspossesses

Haspossesses is a term used in speculative linguistics to describe a hypothetical verb form that fuses the English auxiliary has with the lexical verb possesses to express possession with intensified emphasis on the current state. It is not part of standard grammar and has few, if any, natural-language attestations; it mainly appears in thought experiments, discussions of constructed languages, or typological surveys rather than in empirical descriptions of existing languages.

In theoretical accounts, haspossesses would arise in systems that allow verb fusion or serial verb constructions, where aspectual meaning and possession are encoded in a single predicate. The form could be analyzed as a portmanteau that merges auxiliary plus main-verb meaning, or as a tightly bound compound indicating both possession and a related aspect (such as relevance to the present). Some researchers treat it as a syntactic device for highlighting the state of possession, while others treat it as a purely hypothetical artifact used for cross-llinguistic comparison.

Examples are hypothetical and not standard English. A constructed usage might be: She haspossesses a new car, intended to convey that she currently possesses a new car with emphasis on the possession being established. Another hypothetical sentence could be The owner haspossesses the rights since 2010, illustrating how the fused form might encode both possession and a temporal state. In practice, discussions of haspossesses are pedagogical or exploratory, illustrating how languages can encode possession and aspect beyond the ordinary categories found in English.

See also: have, possess, serial verb constructions, fused predicates, possession in linguistics.