Structural Ambiguities in the Light Verb Constructions: Lexical Relatedness and Divergence∗

One of the most widely used constructions in Korean is the so-called light verb construction (LVC) involving an active-denoting verbal noun (VN) together with the light verb ha-ta ‘do’. This paper first discusses the argument composition of the LVC, mixed properties of VNs both of which have provided a challenge to syntactic analyses with a strict version of X-bar theory. The paper shows the mechanism of multiple classification of category types with systematic inheritance can provide an effective way of capturing these mixed properties. In particular, it assumes that VNs have both [N +] and [V +] features to reflect their dual properties. The paper also addresses the issue of relatedness and divergence between the VNs with an accusative argument and those without it. An implementation of the analysis within the LKB (Linguistics Knowledge Building) system also proves its feasibility and efficiency.