Cover not available

Article published In: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 20:3 (2015) ► pp.326–354

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

Determining light verb constructions in contemporary British and Irish English

 | Université de Lausanne
 | Universität Konstanz
Published online: 28 August 2015
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.20.3.03ron
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.
References (29)
Algeo, J. (1995). Having a look at the expanded predicate. In B. Aarts & Ch. F. Meyer (Eds.), The Verb in Contemporary English: Theory and Description (pp. 203–17). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Allerton, D.J. (2002). Stretched Verb Constructions in English. London, UK: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Aston, G., & Burnard, L. (1998). The BNC Handbook. Exploring the British National Corpus with SARA. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brinton, L., & Akimoto, M. (1999). The origin of the composite predicate in Old English. In L. Brinton & M. Akimoto (Eds.), Collocational and Idiomatic Aspects of Composite Predicates in the History of English (pp. 21–58). Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Claridge, C. (2000). Multi-word Verbs in Early Modern English. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Denison, D. (1981). Aspects of the history of English group-verbs, with particular attention to the syntax of the Ormulum. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Oxford, UK: Oxford University.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Evert, S. (2009). Corpora and collocations. In A. Lüdeling & M. Kytö (Eds.), Corpus Linguistics. An International Handbook (pp. 1212–1248). Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fellbaum, C. (1998). WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gries, S. Th. (2013). 50-something years of work on collocations: What is or should be next… International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 18(1), 137–166. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Grover, C. (2008). LT-TTT2 Example Pipelines Documentation. Edinburgh, UK: University of Edinburgh.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hoffmann, S., Hundt, M., & Mukherjee, J. (2011). Indian English: An emerging epicentre? A pilot study on light-verbs in web-derived corpora of South Asian Englishes. Anglia, 12(3-4), 258–280. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kallen, J.L., & Kirk, J.M. (2008). ICE-Ireland: A User’s Guide. Belfast, UK: Queen’s University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Leech, G., Hundt, M., Mair, Chr., & Smith, N. (2009). Change in Contemporary English. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lehmann, H.M., & Schneider, G. (2009). Parser-based analysis of syntax-lexis interaction. In A.H. Jucker, D. Schreier & M. Hundt (Eds.) Corpora: Pragmatics and Discourse: Papers from the 29th International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 29) (pp. 477–502). Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Matsumoto, M. (2008). From Simple Verbs to Periphrastic Expressions. Bern/Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Meyers, A., Macleod, C., Yangarber, R., Grishman, R., Barrett, L., & Reeves, R. (1998). Using NomLex to produce nominalization patterns for information extraction. In F. Busa, I. Mani, P. Saint-Dizier (Eds.), Proceedings of COLING-ACL98 Workshop: the Computational Treatment of Nominals, Montreal, Canada, 10-14 August 1998 (pp. 25–32). Montreal, Canada: COLING-ACL.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mukherjee, J., & Hoffmann, S. (2009). Patterns across varieties: Verb-complementational profiles of old and new Englishes. In Chr. Reinfandt (Ed.), Anglistentag 2008 Tübingen: Proceedings (pp. 415–424). Trier, Germany: WVT.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nagy T., I., Vincze, V., & Farkas, R. (2013). Full-coverage identification of English light verb constructions. In Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (Eds.), Proceedings of IJCNLP 2013, Nagoya, Japan, 14-18 October 2013 (pp. 329–337). Nagoya, Japan: Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
O’Donnell, M.B., & Ellis, N. (2010). Towards an inventory of English verb-argument constructions. In M. Sahlgren, O. Knutsson (Eds.), Proceedings of the ACL 2010. Proceedings of the NAACL HLT Workshop on Extracting and Using Constructions in Computational Linguistics Session, Los Angeles, California, 2-4 June 2010 (pp. 9–16). Los Angeles, CA: ACL.
Pecina, P. (2009) Lexical Association Measures: Collocation Extraction. Praha, Czech Republic: UFAL.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. (2014). Light-verb constructions in the History of English. In K. Davidse, Gentens, C., Ghesquière, L. & Vandelanotte, L. (Eds.), Corpus Interrogation and Grammatical Patterns (pp. 15–34). Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schneider, G. (2008). Hybrid long-distance functional dependency parsing. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Zurich: Institute of Computational Linguistics, Zurich, Switzerland.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schneider, G., & Zipp, L. (2013). Discovering new verb-preposition combinations in New Englishes. In J. Mukherjee & M. Huber (Eds.), Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English. Helsinki, Finland: Varieng. Retrieved from [URL] (last accessed May 2015).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Seretan, V. (2011). Syntax-Based Collocation Extraction. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tu, Y., & Roth, D. (2011). Learning English light verb constructions: Contextual or statistical. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Multiword Expressions: From Parsing and Generation to the Real World (pp. 31–39). Portland, OR: Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wierzbicka, A. (1982). Why can you have a drink when You can’t *have an eat? Language, 58(4), 753–99. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (14)

Cited by 14 other publications

Fleischhauer, Jens & Anna Riccio
2025. 1Introduction to the volume. In Light Verb Constructions from a Cross-Linguistic Perspective, ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Schneider, Gerold
2025. Combining Collocation Measures and Distributional Semantics to Detect Idioms. In Data-Intensive Investigations of English, ► pp. 104 ff. DOI logo
Giparaitė, Judita
2024. A corpus-based analysis of light verb constructions with MAKE and DO in British English. Kalbotyra 76 ► pp. 18 ff. DOI logo
Egan, Thomas
2023. Giving in English and Norwegian. In Ditransitives in Germanic Languages [Studies in Germanic Linguistics, 7], ► pp. 365 ff. DOI logo
Marco, Josep & Llum Bracho Lapiedra
2023. Light Verb Constructions as a testing ground for the Gravitational Pull Hypothesis. In Corpus Use in Cross-linguistic Research [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 113], ► pp. 12 ff. DOI logo
Wang, Di, Guiying Jiang & Yufan Zheng
2023. Walking out of the light verb jungle: Exploring the translation strategies of light verb constructions in Chinese–English consecutive interpreting. Frontiers in Psychology 14 DOI logo
Yilmaz, Selahattin & Ute Römer
2020. A corpus-based exploration of constructions in written academic English as a lingua franca. In Advances in Corpus-based Research on Academic Writing [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 95], ► pp. 59 ff. DOI logo
MEHL, SETH
2019. Light verb semantics in theInternational Corpus of English: onomasiological variation, identity evidence and degrees of lightness. English Language and Linguistics 23:1 ► pp. 55 ff. DOI logo
Mehl, Seth
2021. What we talk about when we talk about corpus frequency: The example of polysemous verbs with light and concrete senses. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 17:1 ► pp. 223 ff. DOI logo
Ronan, Patricia
2019. Simple versus Light Verb Constructions in Late Modern Irish English Correspondence: A Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis. Studia Neophilologica 91:1 ► pp. 31 ff. DOI logo
Schneider, Gerold & Gintarė Grigonytė
2018. From lexical bundles to surprisal and language models. In Applications of Pattern-driven Methods in Corpus Linguistics [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 82], ► pp. 15 ff. DOI logo
Sundquist, John D.
2018. A Diachronic Analysis of Light Verb Constructions in Old Swedish. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 30:3 ► pp. 260 ff. DOI logo
Sundquist, John D.
2020. Productivity, richness, and diversity of light verb constructions in the history of American English. Journal of Historical Linguistics 10:3 ► pp. 349 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2021. Corpora, Constructions, New Englishes [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 100], DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue