Light verb

In linguistics, a light verb is a verb that has little semantic content of its own and forms a predicate with some additional expression, which is usually a noun.[1] Common verbs in English that can function as light verbs are do, give, have, make, get, and take. Other names for light verb include delexical verb,[2] vector verb, explicator verb, thin verb, empty verb and semantically weak verb. While light verbs are similar to auxiliary verbs regarding their contribution of meaning to the clauses in which they appear, light verbs fail the diagnostics that identify auxiliary verbs and are therefore distinct from auxiliaries.

The intuition between the term "light verb" is that the predicate is not at its full semantic potential. For instance, one does not literally "take" a bath in the same way as one can "take" a cup of sugar. At the same time, light verbs are not completely empty semantically, because there is a clear difference in meaning between "take a bath" and "give a bath", and one cannot "do a bath".[3]

Light verbs can be accounted for in different ways in theoretical frameworks, for example as semantically empty predicate licensers[4] or a kind of auxiliary.[5][6] In dependency grammar approaches they can be analyzed using the concept of the catena.

  1. ^ Concerning light verbs in general, see Jespersen (1965, Volume VI:117), Grimshaw and Mester (1988), and especially Butt (2003:paper attached).
  2. ^ The Collins Cobuild English Grammar, for instance, uses the term delexical verb instead of light verb.
  3. ^ Butt, Miriam (2010). "The light verb jungle: Still hacking away". In Amberber, Mengistu; Baker, Brett; Harvey, Mark (eds.). Complex Predicates: Cross-linguistic Perspectives on Event Structure. Cambridge University Press. pp. 48–78.
  4. ^ Grimshaw, Jane; Mester, Armin (1988). "Light verbs and Θ-marking". Linguistic Inquiry. 19 (2): 205–232.
  5. ^ Hacker, Paul (1958). Zur Funktion einiger Hilfsverben im modernen Hindi. Mainz: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur.
  6. ^ Butt, Miriam (2010). "The light verb jungle: Still hacking away". In Amberber, Mengistu; Baker, Brett; Harvey, Mark (eds.). Complex Predicates: Cross-linguistic Perspectives on Event Structure. Cambridge University Press. pp. 48–78.