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 whet...

This paper deals with the complex verb formation of passive and potential predicates and syntactic structures projected by these verbs. Though both predicates are formed with the suffix -rare which has been assumed to originate from the same stem, they show significantly different syntactic behaviors. We propose two kinds of concatenation of base verbs and auxiliaries; passive verbs are lexical...

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...

Preprocessing of the parallel corpus plays an important role in improving the performance of a phrase-based statistical machine translation (PB-SMT). In this paper, we propose a frame work in which predefined information of Multiword Expressions (MWEs) can boost the performance of PB-SMT. We preprocess the parallel corpus to identify Noun-noun MWEs, reduplicated phrases, complex predicates and ...

This paper, which builds of the work of Hay, Kennedy, and Levin (1999), examines the puzzling aspectual behavior of so-called degree achievements. Drawing evidence from Mandarin Chinese, I argue that degree achievements without difference values denote punctual events, i.e., they are true achievements. I present an analysis that is consistent with facts from both English and Mandarin; to explai...

Property-based random testing à la QuickCheck requires building efficient generators for well-distributed random data satisfying complex logical predicates, but writing these generators can be difficult and error prone. We propose a domain-specific language in which generators are conveniently expressed by decorating predicates with lightweight annotations to control both the distribution of ge...

Predicates such as ‘to be tall’, ‘to be related to Chomsky’ or ‘to know Latin’, which intuitively denote permanent properties, are called individual-level predicates (henceforth: i-predicates); predicates such as ‘to be available’, ‘to talk to Chomsky’ or ‘to study Latin’, which denote properties not necessarily permanent, are called stage-level predicates (henceforth: s-predicates). An impress...