Maciej Jarzbski

Light verbs and the light verb construction

One may wonder which of the English lexemes have the longest entries in the dictionaries. If we look through a dictionary, we will easily notice that authors dedicate most space to verbs such as: come, go, take, give, hit, throw, give, rise, fall, do and make, which represent the category known as light verbs. In this paper, I will focus on the aforementioned issue of light verbs as well as the light verb construction. The paper has been organized in the following way. The first section will present some general information concerning light verbs, provide some examples and a brief summary of the origin of this term. The following section will discuss some further cases of the light verb construction proposed by Culicover and Jackendoff in their book Simpler Syntax. This paper concludes by a brief summary of the discussed aspects of light verbs.

Light verbs
According to A Dictionary of Linguistics & Phonetics, the term light verb refers to a verb whose meaning is so unspecific that it requires a complement in order to form a meaningful and complex predicate. In other words, light verbs are highly dependent on the meaning of their complements. For some of these verbs we may find in English corresponding lexical verbs with more specific meaning (Crystal 2003: 270). Moreover, lexicographers of various languages have always called light verbs a difficult material to study since their meanings are frequently polysemous and idiomatic. In most cases they function as full lexical units and as semilexical ones. Therefore, if we look them up in a dictionary, their entries are always the longest ones and frequently do not exhaust the multitude of meanings carried by these verbs. (Kotsyba 2007: 1) The term light verb was first coined by Otto Jespersen in 1965 and concerned verbal part of composite nominal predicates such as take a shower, have a smoke (Jespersen 1965: 117). He referred to verbs which, even though may have a fuller semantic application in some contexts, can be compounded with some other element, usually a noun or verb, which results in the decrease of their contribution to the meaning of the whole construction (Newson 2006: 159).

Although this class of verbs may seem relatively small and insignificant, the examples will show that they are clearly essential in order to understand some of the VP structures more plainly (Newson 2006: 159). For example, consider the following: (1) a b c e f We had a walk. They did a dance. I took a look. She made a comment. You should give it a kick. = = = = = we walked they danced I looked she commented you should kick it

The examples presented above share one distinctive feature, the italicized verbs contribution to the meaning of the whole sentence is smaller than usual. In such cases the main predicative content is derived from the deverbal noun in the complement position (www.primus.arts.uszeged.hu). However, it is not that these verbs contribute no semantic content to the whole construction as the two sides of the equals sign in (1) are not identical. This is made clear by the following examples (Newson 2006: 159): (2) a b I took a bath. I gave him a bath. = = I bathed (myself) I bathed him

The actual contribution of light verbs to the meaning of an expression can be described as intricate and subtle. For instance, the examples in (2) suggest that they deal somehow with argument structure since the main difference here refers to the number of arguments, whereas the examples in (1) illustrate that the contribution of the light verb can affect aspect (do a dance verses dance) and duration (take a look verses look) of an event (Newson 2006: 159160). It seems that these verbs lie somewhere between thematic verbs with a full descriptive content and functional verbs which play no role in the thematic structure of the sentence (Newson 2006: 160). Hence the name light verbs, they contribute to thematic and other features of semantic structure, however, in a lighter manner than fully thematic main verbs (Newson 2006: 160). The following examples demonstrate the light verbs which take verbal complements, but they function similarly to the cases above:
2

(3)

a b c

I made the glass shatter. They got the door shut. We let the water run.

= = =

I shattered the glass they shut the door we ran the water

As in the previous examples, here the light verbs contribute to the meaning of the construction and the two sides of the equals sign are not identical. However, the degree to which these verbs make a contribution to the meaning is not the same. Clearly, the contribution of make in (3a) is rather minor, conversely to let in (3c), where the contribution is considerably greater. Compare: (4) a b I made the door close I let the door close

Only the first case could be paraphrased into I closed the door, although in both cases the agent performed the action that resulted in the door becoming closed (Newson 2006: 160). It has become standard in recent years to represent light verbs with a lower case v rather than an upper case V, which is used for fully thematic verbs (Newson 2006: 160). If we want to find out what is the structure of the VP containing a light verb, we should focus on the examples in (3). While to the left of the light verb we have a subject, to the right we appear to have a VP consisting of the main verb and its arguments. Providing that the main VP is a complement of the light verb, we may come up with the following structure (Newson 2006: 160):

(5)

The thematic relationships are straightforward. The theme argument, the vase, is in the specifier of the VP as we discovered previously. The verb break therefore looks fairly similar to an unaccusative verb. The specifier of the vP is interpreted as an agent and therefore the light verb is clearly not unaccusative (Newson 2006: 161). It is obvious that unaccusative verbs as well as prepositional ones have no complement, in the case above the light verb has a VP complement. In terms of the UTAH, we might therefore propose that the agent -role is assigned to the specifier of a (light) verb which has a VP complement (Newson 2006: 161). The insertion of such complex VP into a sentence shows that the agent in the clausal subject position and the theme seems to remain a part of the VP: (6) she1 may have [vP t1 made [VP the window open]]

As the theme does not move, we can conclude that it gets case in its original position. Interestingly, there is no case assigned when there is no light verb forcing the theme to move out of the VP (Newson 2006: 161): (7) the window1 could have [VP t1 opened] If the theme subject receives no case in its original VP internal position then it has to move to the nominative subject position. The interesting thing is how the theme gets its case in (6). Obviously, the main difference is the presence of the light verb and consequently we might make the assumption that the responsibility for assigning accusative case to the theme takes this verb (Newson 2006: 161):

(8)

Consider the event structure expressed by this verbal complex. It is fairly clear that there is one (complex) event described by the light verb and thematic verb complex: there is just one clause here with one subject. The event, however, is made up of two sub-events: she does something and this causes the vase to break (Newson 2006: 161): (9) e = e1 e2 : e1 = she did something e2 = the vase broke We should pay attention to the fact that the complex event structure is reflected by the complex VP structure. The VP consists of two sub-events and two parts, i.e. an upper vP and a lower VP. Besides, while the vP is linked with the first sub-event and the causative connection between the sub-events, the VP is related to the sub-event resulting from the first. This indicates that there is a connection between event structure and syntactic structure, specifically the more complex the event structure, the more complex the syntactic structure used to represent it (Newson 2006: 162).

The light verb construction according to Culicover and Jackendoff

One of the three special methods of mapping CS to syntax discussed by Culicover and Jackendoff involves the light verb construction. The authors present the aforesaid construction with the examples (10b,c) and (11b,c):

(10)

a b c

Pat blamed the accident on Dana. Pat put the blame for the accident on Dana. Dana received the blame for the accident from Pat. Sandy promised Chris to leave on time. Sandy gave Chris a promise to leave on time. Chris got from Sandy a promise to leave on time.

(11)

a b c

In case of the a sentences, the verbs blame and promise are used as ordinary verbs. Their thematic roles are mapped to syntax. We can easily notice that in terms of thematic roles the b and c sentences correspond to the a sentences. However, in the sentences b and c blame and promise are used as nominals, and the main verb functions as a light verb (Culicover and Jackendoff 2005: 222). Ray Jackendoff in A Deep Structure Projection Rule (1974) presented the idea that the nominal and the verb share thematic roles. The act of blaming involves a person making a speech act or having a thought that ascribes blame, a person being blamed, and a nasty situation for which the person being blamed is allegedly responsible. Crudely, the first two of these roles correspond to agent/source and recipient/goal respectively (Culicover and Jackendoff 2005: 222). In the 10a sentence, the syntactic positions are assigned to the arguments of the verb blame in the usual manner. When the word blame is used as a nominal, it shares the roles with the main verb. In the 10b sentence, an agent is assigned to subject position by the verb put, whereas a goal of motion to the PP complement. Therefore, the roles are shared as follows: Pat is the blamer and Dana is the blame. In the example 10c, although syntactic positions are switched, the verb receive causes the same sharing of roles, as in the previous example. The cases form (11) can be analyzed in a similar way (Culicover and Jackendoff 2005: 223). Taking everything into consideration, the main condition for a light verb construction to exist in a language is the existence of a small repertoire of lexical items that has little semantic content of their own, their meanings are bleached out, though not removed entirely (Culicover and Jackendoff 2005: 225). Natalia Kotsyba in her paper Semantics of light verbs in lexicographical presentation points out that as far as the linguistic literature is concerned, the definition and the semantics of light verbs still remain ambiguous and their lexical semantic specifications are too general. However, constructions such as the light verb

construction play a prominent and productive role not only in English, but also in many other languages.

References
1. Crystal, David. 2003. A Dictionary of Linguistics & Phonetics. Padstow: Blackwell

Publishing Ltd.
2. Culicover, Peter W., Ray Jackendoff. 2005. Simpler Syntax. New York: Oxford

University Press Inc.

3. Jespersen, Otto. 1965. A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles, Part VI,

Morphology. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd.

4. Kotsyba, Natalia. 2007. Semantics of Light Verbs in Lexicographical Presentation.

http://www.domeczek.pl/~natko/papers/nk_GrodnoX07.pdf
5. Newson, Mark et al. 2006. Basic English Syntax with Exercises. Budapest: Blcssz

Konzorcium.