Light verbs pose an a challenge in linguistics because of its syntactic and semantic versatility and its unique distribution different from regular verbs with higher semantic content and selectional resrictions. Due to its light grammatical content, earlier natural language processing studies typically put light verbs in a stop word list and ignore them. Recently, however, classification and id...

A subset of German function verbs can be used either in a full, concrete, 'heavy' ("take a computer") or in a more metaphorical, abstract or 'light' meaning ("take a shower", no actual 'taking' involved). The present magnetoencephalographic (MEG) study explored whether this subset of 'light' verbs is represented in distinct cortical processes. A random sequence of German 'heavy', 'light', and p...

Coercion verbs have been taken to include not only aspectual verbs like begin, start, and finish but also psychological verbs such as enjoy, endure, and savor and control verbs like try and attempt. Their unifying property has been assumed to be that they select for eventive complements (e.g. John began/enjoyed reading the book/the meeting). On this view, the composition of an entity-denoting e...

A novel analysis of aspectual verbs is proposed according to which aspectual verbs are heads of functional projections rather than main verbs taking clausal complements. As a case study, four Japanese aspectual verbs are analyzed: those that express inception (hajime‘begin’), continuation (tsuzuke‘continue’), and termination (oe‘finish’, and owar‘end’). Employing data from previous studies, Jap...

This paper addresses the problem of learning the class of raising verbs (e.g seem). These verbs are potentially problematic for learners in that unlike typical main verbs these verbs do not stand in a semantic relation with any Noun Phrase (NP) arguments. Moreover, a second class of verbs, known as control verbs, shares certain distributional properties with raising verbs, but the two verb clas...

Abstract It is well-known that children whose native language Japanese first begin vocalizing potential verbs at about the age of 2 years and continue to utter ungrammatical forms which are not used in adults’ speech as well correct ones until approximately 5 when their acquisition completes, with virtually no erroneous uses observed. Interestingly enough, process proceeds a manner parallel cau...