The Light Verb Jungle

The study of light verbs and complex predicates is frought with dangers and misunderstandings that go beyond the merely terminological. This paper attempts to pic through the terminological, theoretical and empirical jungle in order to arrive at a novel understanding of the role of light verbs crosslinguistically. In particular, this paper addresses how light verbs and complex predicates can be identified crosslinguistically, what the relationship between the two is, and whether light verbs must always be associated with uniform syntactic and semantic properties. Finally, the paper proposes a novel view of how light verbs are situated in the lexicon by addressing some historical data and their relationship with preverbs and verb particles. Jespersen (1965,Volume VI:117) is generally credited with first coining the term light verb, which he applied to English V+NP constructions as in (1).