In a recent article, Harves and Kayne (2012:120–121) propose the following universal:
The authors’ argument for the validity of (1) is based upon a typological survey of about 50 languages. They introduce the terms H-languages and B-languages in order to classify languages from the viewpoint of their predicative possessive constructions. H-languages have a transitive verb ‘to have’ whose subject is the possessor and whose object is the possessee. B-languages, on the other hand, use a construction with a copular or existential verb in which the possessor is marked with an oblique case and the possessee is treated as the subject of an intransitive verb.
This terminology presents two major problems.
First, it neglects the fact that one language can have several competing constructions to express possessive predication. This is for example the case of Latin, which according to table 1 (adapted from Harves and Kayne 2012:126) is...