The Syntactic and Semantic Status of the Existential Verbs biti, imati and trebati

Sa？etak Syntactic and semantic polysemy is a well-known characteristic of the verbs biti ‘be’, imati ‘have’ and trebati ‘need’. Thus, biti has no lexical meaning in itself when it is used as an auxiliary or as a copula, or as a periphrastic verb. However, it acts as a lexical verb when used in phrases in which it does not lose its lexical meaning, i.e., where its meaning is ‘to exist’, ‘to spend an amount of time at a location’, etc. (Sili？ and Pranjkovi？ 2005: 290). If it is used in such or similar contexts, biti is seen as an existential verb (e.g. Sili？ and Pranjkovi？ 2005, Kuna and Belaj 2013, Belaj and Tanackovi？ Faletar 2014, Bra？ and Bo？njak Botica 2015), i.e., it is observed as an existential construction or predicate (Zovko Dinkovi？ 2011: 280). Existential verbs in Croatian have so far been considered from a categorial point of view (e.g. Birti？ 2001, Kordi？ 2002, Zovko Dinkovi？ 2011, Kuna and Belaj 2013), while their syntactic status has not been analysed. For example, the analyses of the category of existentiality carried out so far, i.e., the analyses of existential verbs and their complements, have not included the syntactic status of the verb biti in the phrases such as Nije bilo struje ‘There was no power’, Luke nije bilo na nastavi (There was no Luka-G in class) ‘Luka was not in class’, Luka nije bio na nastavi ‘Luka was not in class’, Luka je u Zagrebu ‘Luka is in Zagreb’, etc. Is the status of the verb biti in all these examples the same? What is the syntactic status of its complements? The same questions arise with the verbs imati ‘have’ and nemati ‘not to have’ and their complements in sentences such as Ima / Nema struje ‘There is / There is no power’, Luke nema na nastavi (There is no Luka-G in class) ‘Luka is not in class’ and other, as well as with the verb trebati ‘need’ and its complements in sentences Luki treba kruh, Luki treba kruha ‘Luka needs bread’. This paper first includes the verb trebati in the discussion on existential verbs. Applying the methodology of cognitive grammar and the Russian and German traditions of dependency grammar and starting from the assumption that the loss of a verb’s lexical meaning results in its lesser independence, i.e. in its greater dependence on an obligatory predicate complement, we will attempt to determine the syntactic-semantic status of the Croatian verbs biti, imati (nemati) and trebati