I have water FOR eight days

[aryamanarora]

Encountered in Hindi, but multilingual issue:

मेरे पास मुश्किल से आठ दिनों के लिए पीने का पानी था। 1SG-GEN near difficult ADV eight day.PL.OBL for drink.OBL GEN water be.PST I had, with difficulty, drinking water for eight days.

Originally, I thought of this as a sufficiency/excess think so I labelled ComparisonRef\~Purpose (but note there's no equivalent to "enough").

@nitinvwaran suggested Duration (water [will last] for eight days), and we also thought of QuantityValue (because the amount of water = eight days worth). All seem to have some merit...

[nschneid]

This is like the Wherewithal construction in English, with a nonlexical notion of sufficiency: "I have the water to last 3 days"

[nschneid]

Going based on the English gloss—I think the best policy is to focus not on the full interpretation of "water for eight days", but on the relation between "water" and "eight days". Duration usually modifies events, but "water" is not an event.

This is a great example of converging semantic relationships for which the preposition only conveys a tiny bit of the meaning.

I think the choice of FOR signals that the water is serving a purpose: "water for eight days" = an amount of water that would amount to eight days' worth of use; eight days is the duration of the use, from which one can infer the quantity. "With difficulty" primes us to infer a notion of sufficiency—that the speaker is concerned with reaching a minimum quantity threshold. But without an explicit predicate like "enough"—or a construction like the Wherewithal construction or the Worth construction—I'm not sure this belongs in our annotation.

Thus, for "I have water FOR eight days", my instinct is to say FOR is plain Purpose. But what we understand is far more:

• water WITH_PURPOSE [something related to "eight days"]
• water WITH_PURPOSE BEING_USED(Duration=eight days)
• water WITH_QUANTITY SUFFICIENT FOR_PURPOSE BEING_USED(Duration=eight days)