A Cognitive Approach to Light Verb Constructions: Backstage Issues

This thesis investigated the event argument, an abstract linguistic element proposed by Davidson (1967), and the light verb (VP-shell) construction, first proposed by Larson (1988). Recent theories regarding the location of the event argument in syntax range from claims that it is not represented syntactically, to locating it in lexical projections, to proposals assigning two functional projections for the syntactic representation of events. The purpose of this thesis was to analyze the relationship between the event argument and the light verb construction. The thesis is based on the Minimalist approach (Chomsky 1995). Different approaches to the event argument and the light verb construction were compared to determine their similarities and differences. A proposal was made regarding the relationship between the event argument and the light verb construction. This thesis claimed that the location of the event argument in syntactic structure is in the head of the light verb projection.

Multiword lexical units such as complex predicates, which consist of light verbs and predicative nouns, have long remained on the periphery of traditional syntactic theories. Light verb constructions pose a serious challenge for both theoretical and applied linguistics, as their syntactic structures are not solely determined by verbs alone but also by predicative nouns. There is assumed to be the lack of a comprehensive definition of the concept of light verbs that can account for the cross-linguistic diversity in the types and scope of light verb constructions. In particular, there is still no theoretical framework that adequately describes the complex argument structure formed by the interaction between light verbs and predicative nouns in light verb constructions. This paper investigates the syntactic and semantic representation of Czech light verb constructions. Light verb constructions represent a type of complex predicate where two syntactic elements serve as a single predicate. In this paper I focus to address crucial syntactic-semantic aspects closely related to the fundamental concept of light verbs. Specifically, based on the [+LIGHT] semantic features of desemanticized light verbs, this paper applies reduction and co-reference constraints to analyze the syntactic-semantic structure of light verb constructions. Finally I discuss the question of thematic role assignment between light verbs and predicative nouns.

Light verb constructions (LVCs) are composed of two elements: a light verb and a coverb that represent a complex predicate. The coverb can be a noun, an adjective, a verb or a prepositional phrase. The focus of the present work of research is LVCs with nominal coverbs in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The work provides a characterization of the construction and explores its lexical, syntactic and semantic aspects. The findings of this work demonstrates that LVCs in MSA are compositional. Moreover, the elements of the composite are rigid and cannot be separated as the two elements represent a single semantic unit. LVs are distinct from the lexical analogues in terms of meaning and argument structure and this supports the argument structure view that the elements belong to two distinct entries. Furthermore, the study reveals two distinct classes of LVCs, which themselves incorporate unique morphosyntactic and semantic aspects: agentive and non-agentive LVCs. The study further highlights, beside agentivity, the elements of causation and boundedness that are contributed to the construction. This research advances the understanding of LVCs in MSA, providing valuable insights for linguists.

This paper aims at a lexical description of frequent uses of frequent lexical verbs in Swedish on the background of Czech, with some implications for the lexical description of such verb uses verbs in general. It results in a draft of a production lexicon of Swedish frequent verbs for advanced Czech learners of Swedish, with focus on their uses as light verbs. The introductory sections (1 and 2) discuss semantic shifts in highly frequent lexical verbs, whose most literal or ‘primary’ uses express motion, location, or physical control; e.g. stand, put, go, hold. These verbs are called basic verbs, which is a term coined by Viberg (Viberg, 1990) that suggests that they typically denote events belonging to basic level categories described by Lakoff (Lakoff, 1987). The ‘literalness’ of verb uses is judged according to how much they are the ones speakers pick first to illustrate the meaning of that given verb (cognitive salience, a term coined by Hanks in (Hanks, forthcoming). Hanks pointed out an interesting discrepancy between the cognitive salience and the actual frequency of a given verb usage in large corpora. This discrepancy is extremely significant in basic verbs. Some of their uses exhibit such a low cognitive salience, that they are not even noticed by native speakers. This has consequences in second-language acquisition. Foreign learners, even the advanced ones, often lack competence in using the most frequent lexical verbs of the second language in their most frequent patterns. Basic verbs often act as light verbs. Sections 3 to 7 are dedicated to light verbs and light verb constructions. Section 8 discusses the morphosyntactic variability in predicate nouns (i.e. the nominal components of light verb constructions) and their possible semantic impact on the entire light verb construction. Different aspects of polysemy of basic verbs are dealt with by contrasting Swedish examples to Czech in Section 9. Special attention is paid to uses of basic verbs that denote relations between abstract entities. Section 10 focuses on grammaticalizing uses of lexical verbs. It gives a Swedish example of context-induced reinterpretation – an interesting semantic shift that often leads to grammaticalization. © 2009 PBML. All rights reserved. Please cite this article as: Silvie Cinkova, A Contrastive Lexical Description of Basic Verbs: Examples from Swedish and Czech. The Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics No. 92, 2009, 21–61. PBML 92 DECEMBER 2009 All the aspects of basic verbs discussed in Sections 1–10 are integrated in a structure of a Swedish-Czech lexicon, which captures verbs and predicate nouns in two respective interlinked parts. Sections 11-14 give its detailed decription.

Light verb constructions (LVCs) in English and Romance languages are somewhat unique crosslinguistically because LVCs in these languages tend to have semantically similar synthetic verb counterparts (Zarco 1999): e.g.make an appearanceandappear. This runs contrary to assumptions in linguistic theories that two competing forms are rarely maintained in a language unless they serve distinct purposes (e.g. Grice 1975). Why do English LVCs exist alongside counterpart synthetic verbs, especially given that synthetic verbs are arguably the more efficient form (Zipf 1949)? It has been proposed that LVCs serve an aspectual function (Prince 1972, Live 1973, Wierzbicka 1982, Tanabe 1999, Butt & Geuder 2001), as there are telic LVC counterparts (e.g.have a thought) of atelic verbs (e.g.think). This proposal has been difficult to evaluate without a large-scale resource providing a markup of both LVCs and counterpart verbs. Addressing this gap in resources, the present research describes the development of guidelines for LVC annotation in the English PropBank (Bonial & Palmer 2015). The focus of this article is the subsequent analysis of these annotations, aimed at uncovering corpus evidence of what contexts call for the use of an LVC over a synthetic verb. The corpus study shows that the general function of LVCs is not an aspectual one and provides distributional evidence that the ease and variety with which LVCs can be modified is the general motivating factor for the use of an LVC.

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Kearns (1988) has previously proposed two types of Light Verb Constructions in English: True Light Verb Constructions and Vague Action Verb Constructions. This paper claims that the Korean Light Verb Construction without an accusative marker corresponds to the True Light Verb Construction in English, while the Korean Light Verb Construction with an accusative marker corresponds to the Vague Action Verb Construction in English. Joh (2017) has claimed that, for the former, we can apply the Type Coercion mechanism, while, for the latter, a Co-compositional process takes place. Extending this analysis, this paper claims that the two types of Korean Light Verb Constructions can be explained by the two different generative mechanisms. One of the biggest advantages of this paper is that it finds that the two types of Light Verb Construction observed in Korean is not an isolated phenomenon but provides clear and concrete evidence to the claim that there are two different types of Light Verb Constructions in natural languages by showing that they can be morphologically evidenced.

In this study we take an ‘above the clause’ perspective on the conceptualisation of complex events of Irish English and Modern Irish within a functional Role and Reference Grammar perspective, using corpus based data. Functional models of language generally assume some layered structure of the clause, the noun phrase and the word. (Nolan 2012a, 2012b; Van Valin 2005). While excellent work has heretofore been achieved at clause level, the description of important linguistic phenomena above the clause has often been somewhat neglected. In this regard, a central part of the grammar of every human language is the encoding of events and their participants in a clause. This motivates an ‘above the clause’ perspective to characterise the balance between uniformity of encoding and variability in encoding within and across languages. In the functional-cognitive paradigm, form and meaning are not separated into self-contained components. Instead, syntactic structures of varying degrees of complexity and abstraction are paired with their corresponding semantic structures. We argue that the interaction of semantic relations with the hierarchy of clausal linkage is at the strongest pole with the semantic relations covering phase and modifying subevents. We also argue that light verb constructions are formed pre-syntactically in the lexicon using and defend this by applying certain criteria as a diagnostic. The function of light verbs in these constructions is to modulate the realisation of event and sub-event semantics into syntax. We provide evidence of the dynamicity in conceptualising a complex event, considered as complex predication across constructions, in Irish English and Modern Irish.

This paper addresses the problem of isolating light verb constructions (LVC) and classifying them according to semantic-syntactic parameters. LVC are firstly classified as a subtype of collocation. This step is important since it places the study of these constructions within a theoretical framework and defines the tests that are valid for their identification. Subsequently, on the basis of the reduction test (nominalization of the LVC and deletion of the verb), a boundary is traced between causative and non causative LVC on the one side and between base and extended LVC on the other side. Ultimately, a grid of semantic/aspectual criteria is proposed in order to distinguish different types of extended LVC. The application of this grid to Italian data allows a semantic classification of LVC based on a semantic decompositional analysis. This classification shows how it is possible to isolate different degrees in the function played by the verb in a LVC, according to its contribution to the semantic interpretation of the construction.

The point of departure of this paper is the hypothesis that, by examining the various labels used for the verbal expressions (also) known as light verb constructions (e.g., periphrastic constructions, pleonastic expressions, semi-compositional constructions), it is possible to pinpoint the features that the various approaches dealing with that particular category and that phenomenon interpret as definitive, essential specificities of the linguistic units in question (cf. 2.1). In addition, the exploration of the differences across categories referred to by terms that are synonymous (at least in some of their uses) might contribute to outlining the features of prototypical and non-prototypical light verb constructions, and refining the systematization of the above-mentioned expressions.
 In this article, I will first review the general characteristics of denomination (2.1), and those of terminology formation (2.2). After that, I will briefly sketch the approaches typically connected to the terms that are occasionally used synonymously with the term light verb construction (3). Then, on the basis of the intersection of the different approaches, I will outline a definition of light verb constructions that can currently be regarded as being the most general and accepted (4). Finally, combining several views found in the literature, I will attempt a prototype-based approach to the construction type under discussion and determine the features of prototypical light verb constructions (5).

This paper deals with the identification of verbal multiword expressions in Croatian using NooJ. We focus on light verb constructions, i.e. constructions consisting of a light verb and a nominal part (e.g. donijeti odluku ‘to make a decision’ or ‘to reach a decision’). The nominal part in light verb constructions (LVCs) can be either a noun phrase (e.g. dati udarac ‘to give a blow’) or a prepositional phrase (staviti na raspolaganje ‘to put at disposal’). Light verbs are entirely or partially deprived of their lexical meaning and the meaning of the whole construction is conveyed by their complimentary NPs or PPs. All elements in these constructions act as a single unit at some level of linguistic analysis, particularly at the level of semantics and, more recently, of syntax.

In this paper we present a Lexicalized Feature-based Tree-Adjoining Grammar analysis for a type of nominal predicate that occurs in combination with the light verbs “do” and “be” (Hindi kar and ho respectively). Light verb constructions are a challenge for computational grammars because they are a highly productive predicational strategy in Hindi. Such nominals have been discussed in the literature (Mohanan, 1997; Ahmed and Butt, 2011; Bhatt et al., 2013), but this work is a first attempt at a Tree-Adjoining Grammar (TAG) representation. We look at three possibilities for the design of elementary trees in TAG and explore one option in depth using Hindi data. In this analysis, the nominal is represented with all the arguments of the light verb construction, while the light verb adjoins into its elementary tree.

Abstract. Persian Light Verb Constructions (LVCs), consisting of a light verb and a preverb, fall into two groups: separable and inseparable. The nominal preverbs in the former, unlike those in the latter, can function as direct object DP argument, can be modified by an adjective, and can be relativized, scrambled and focused on by Wh‐interrogatives. In this paper, it is argued that the (in)separability of LVCs cannot necessarily be an indication of the fact that LVCs are formed at two levels of representation. It is shown that (in)separability of LVCs follows from the semantic and morphosyntactic properties of preverbs and light verbs in the language.

This chapter focuses on a light verb construction (LVC) from both Portuguese and Spanish, dar conselho/consejo (“to give advice”). The chapter provides an overview of the literature both on the concept of light verbs and, in particular, on the syntactic and semantic analyses put forward by previous literature on Portuguese and Spanish. This literature on LVCs has focused on their syntactic analyzability, predicational nature, argument structure, and semantic compositionality. These topics are discussed and illustrated further in the section on present-day Portuguese and Spanish. The diachronic section tracks the evolution of the LVC. It concludes that dar conselho/consejo underwent no semantic change and only limited syntactic changes linked to their clause-taking abilities, mostly in Spanish rather than in Portuguese. This chapter explores a noun-based construction with limited changes, as opposed to the other constructions in this book, and one which reveals syntactic differences between both languages.

One of the most widely used constructions in Korean is the so-called light verb construction (LVC) involving an active-denoting verbal noun (VN) together with the light verb ha-ta`do'. This paper first discusses the argument composition of the LVC, mixed properties of VNs which have provided a challenge to syntactic analyses with a strict version of X-bar theory. The paper shows the mechanism of multiple classification of category types with systematic inheritance can provide an effective way of capturing these mixed properties. An implementation of the analysis within the LKB (Linguistics Knowledge Building) system proves its feasibility and efficiency.