It's true that people often claim that BE has no meaning, but I'm on 
Michael's side here. In a sentence like (1)
(1) Dick is a linguist.
we have two concepts, Dick and 'linguist', in some kind of relationship. 
How do we know what this relationship is? Because they're joined 
syntactically by BE, which says it can be 'isA'. Or it can be '=' as in (2).
(2) Dick is a certain linguist who lives in London.
Or it can be 'age':
(3) Dick is 70.
- but only if the subject is a living thing. Contrast:
(4) The book is £5.
And so on. All these possibilities are included in the polysemy of BE; 
but you can't be polysemous unless you've got a meaning.

But then there's the question of whether there's a (non-linguistic) 
concept you'd like to call 'Being'. I think there is: the very general 
state of being located somewhere (or, following Jackendoff, being in 
some state such as happiness), as in (5) and (6).
(5) Dick is in London.
(6) Dick is in a good mood.
Maybe this is even the default state, as indeed (I think) I've suggested 
on occasions; it has a time and a duration, so it's not just a 
relationship between Dick and the place. It's a state with two 
participants: an er and a place.

But what about Having? Take (7).
(7) Dick has a bike.
This is another state, but there are lots of reasons for relating it to 
Being. For one thing, in a lot of languages it's expressed by the verb 
'be'; e.g. in French (when the possession is definite):
(8) Le vélo est a` Dick
And in Arabic 'X have Y' is always translated as 'Y be with X'. My view 
is that Having isA Being, but with the location as er and the original 
er demoted to ee. I.e. (7) means that Dick is the location of the state 
whose ee is a bike which also inherits the properties of the default er.

So, to summarise, I think:
a. both BE and HAVE have senses - lots of them, in fact - including:
b. Being and Having, which are very elementary cognitive units, part of 
our general cognition.

Dick

Linas Vepstas wrote:
> 2009/12/15 Michael Turner <[log in to unmask]>:
>> The only way I can get anywhere near making this HAVE-and-BE-lack-sense
>> idea
> 
> If I catch the drift of the conversation, this seems to be about
> copulas.  A good place to start is to read as much as you can
> stand about copula, and then read about zero copula for yet
> another variation.
> 
> I don't know WG, but its fairly widely understood in one way or
> another that copular verbs don't have "senses" or "meanings",
> even though they do have a wide range of auxilliary functions.  And
> its not just "to-be" and "to-have" -- there are other copular verbs
> -- so e.g.  "to-do" -- for example -- "I like to cook" should be
> understood to mean "I like to do the activity of preparing food",
> where the the "to-do" got zero-copula'ed right out of that sentence.
> Does "to do" have a meaning in this sentence? Gosh, why it doesn't
> even appear in the sentence!
> 
> A good example of a zero-copula form of "to-be" is "the rose
> smelled sweet" -- which is understood as "the rose to-have
> being-ness property of sweet-smell" -- or "the rose to-be
> in state of sweet-smelliness" -- or "the rose is-a thing having
> property of sweet-smell". The "to-be/to-have" relationship is there,
> but the words for it are normally omitted, when expressed in
> the English language.  Hopefully this illustrates why "to-be"
> and "to-have" both have the same un-meaning.
> 
> wikipedia has the following list:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_copulae
> 
> but  it seems to me that these are all special cases of
> to-be/have or to-do.
> 
> --linas
> 
> 

-- 
Richard Hudson; www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm tells more about
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