ABSTRACT
The relation between being and having has puzzled humans for millennia. Among grammarians, Benveniste offers an excellent instance of both caution and open mindedness when dealing with the details of this intriguing relationship. He tells us:
That to have is an auxiliary with the same status as “to be” is a very strange thing. [To have] has the construction of a transitive verb, but it is not. . . . In fact, to have as a lexeme is a rarity in the world; most languages do not have it.
