Determining light verb constructions in contemporary British and Irish English

Abstract

This study implements an automated parser-based approach to the investigation of light verb constructions. The database consisting of ICE-GB and ICE-IRE is used to obtain qualitative and quantitative results on the use of light verb structures. The study explains and evaluates the steps employed to optimize parser output in detecting open lists of light verb constructions. It discusses the qualitative usage differences of these structures in the data between the two varieties and finds that ICE-GB favours fewer high frequency light verbs while ICE-IRE contains more diverse lower frequency light verbs and more passives. Overall, counts of light verb constructions are considerably higher than previously assumed. The projected counts suggest that attestations of light verb constructions will increase considerably if the search is not restricted to certain high-frequency light verbs as is typically done in studies employing manual or semi-automatic approaches to data collection. Overall, counts of light verb constructions are considerably higher than assumed so far.The projected counts suggest that attestations of light verb constructions will increase considerably if the search is not restricted to certain high-frequent light verbs as is typically done in studies employing manual or semi-automatic approaches to data collection.

Light verb semantics in theInternational Corpus of English: onomasiological variation, identity evidence and degrees of lightness

“…Jespersen (1954: 117) coined the term light verb for verbs in such constructions, referring to similar criteria. As with Poutsma and Jespersen, one defining feature of light verbs continues to be the existence of a verb that is semantically equivalent to the DO (Huddleston andPullum 2002: 290-4, Ronan andSchneider 2015; see also OED3 make, v., sub-sense 45 and take, v., sense VIII).…”

“…Algeo 1995, Leech et al 2009) or in other varieties worldwide (cf. Smith 2009, Hoffmann et al 2011, Werner and Mukherjee 2012, Ronan and Schneider 2015. Such work tends to involve quantitative comparisons of light verbs against each other, noting for example that LVCs with have are more common than LVCs with take in New Zealand, Australian, and British English (Smith 2009).…”

“…Do the three light verbs, make, take, and give, differ semantically in terms of their polysemy in use, as shown by identity evidence? 1 Huddleston and Pullum (2002) identify the 'main' light verbs as give, make, have, take, and do; Werner and Mukherjee (2012) investigate LVCs with give and take; Hoffmann et al (2011) investigate give, take, and have; Smith (2009) investigates make, take, give, and have;and Ronan and Schneider (2015) use give LVCs to create a gold standard for automatically identifying light verbs including make, take, and others. All the verbs cited above could be investigated using the methods here; the investigation of make, take, and give here is a reasonable starting point.…”

“…The present work also differs from recent corpus studies of LVCs (cf. Smith 2009, Hoffmann et al 2011, Werner and Mukherjee 2012, Ronan and Schneider 2015 insofar as I adopt an onomasiological approach for detailed manual semantic analysis of specific alternation patterns for individual LVCs, rather than broad descriptions of large quantities of light verbs and their collocation patterns.…”

“…They observe a few LVCs that occur more frequently in South Asian data than in British data, including give boost and have a glimpse (ibid: 273-4). Ronan and Schneider (2015) employ computational methods to identify LVCs in ICE-GB and ICE-Ireland. They find that British English displays a narrower range of high-frequency light verbs, while Irish English displays a more diverse array of low-frequency light verbs.…”