The Light Verb Jungle: Still Hacking Away

This is a revised and updated version of Butt (2003), which noted that the study of light verbs and complex predicates is frought with dangers and misunderstandings that go beyond the merely terminological.1 The paper thus attempts to provide some clarity by addressing 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. Based primarily on both diachronic and synchronic evidence from the South Asian language Urdu, but also by taking crosslinguistic patterns into account, this paper attempts to pull together the relevant available knowledge in order to arrive at a more definitive understanding of light verbs. 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).