Light verb

In linguistics, a light verb is a verb participating in complex predication that has little semantic content of its own, but provides through inflection some details on the event semantics, such aspect, mood, or tense. The semantics of the compound, as well as its argument structure, are determined by the head or primary component of the compound, which may be a verb or noun (V+V or V+N compounds). Other names for "light verb" include: vector verb or explicator verb, emphasising its role within the compound; or thin verb or semantically weak verb, emphasising (as with "light") its lack of semantics. A "semantically weak" verb is not to be confused with a "weak verb" as in the Germanic weak inflection. Light verbs are similar to auxiliary verbs in some ways.

Most English light verbs occur in V+N forms sometimes called "stretched verbs": for example, "take" in "take a nap", where the primary sense is provided by "nap", and "take" is the light verb. The light verbs most common in these constructions are also common in phrasal verbs. A verb which is "light" in one context may be "heavy" in another: as with "take" in "I will take a book to read."

Examples in other languages include the Yiddish "geb" in "geb a helf" (literally give a help, "help"), and French "faire" in "faire semblant" (lit. make seeming, "pretend") or Hindi "nikal paRA" (lit. leave fall, "start to leave"). Some verbs are found in many such expressions; to reuse an earlier example, "take" is found in "take a nap", "take a shower", "take a sip", "take a bow", "take turns", and so on. Light verbs are extremely common in Indo-Iranian languages, Japanese, etc, in which verb compounding is a primary mechanism for marking aspectual distinctions.

Light verbs are interesting to linguists from a variety of perspectives, including those of diachronic linguistics, compositionality, and computational linguistics. From the diachronic perspective, light verbs are said to have evolved from the "heavy" verb through semantic bleaching, a process in which it loses some or all of its original semantics. In this sense, it is often viewed as part of a cline::verb (heavy) → light verb → auxiliary verb → clitic → affix → conjugation

In computational linguistics, a serious challenge is that of identifying compound verbs, which require marking light verbs.

ee also

*phrasal verb
*serial verb — compound of multiple "heavy" verbs

Useful links

* [http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/home/butt/harvard-work.pdf Miriam Butt's "The light verb jungle"]
* [http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~tanyeefa/research/lvc/ Tan Yee Fan's site for light verb constructions]
* [http://www.qwantz.com/ryannorth-lvcs.pdf Ryan North's "Computational Measures of the Acceptability of Light Verb Constructions"]