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<Paper uid="W04-0401">
  <Title>implementation, and use of the Ngram Statistic Package. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics.</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Linguistic Properties of LVCs
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> An LVC is a multiword expression that combines a light verb with a complement of type noun, adjective, preposition or verb, as in, respectively, give a speech, make good (on), take (NP) into account, or take a walk. The light verb itself is drawn from a limited set of semantically general verbs; among the commonly used light verbs in English are take, give, make, have, and do. LVCs are highly productive in some languages, such as Persian, Urdu, and Japanese (Karimi, 1997; Butt, 2003; Miyamoto, 2000). In languages such as French, Italian, Spanish and English, LVCs are semi-productive constructions (Wierzbicka, 1982; Alba-Salas, 2002; Kearns, 2002).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The syntactic and semantic properties of the complement of an LVC determine distinct types of constructions. Kearns (2002) distinguishes between two usages of light verbs in LVCs: what she calls a true light verb (TLV), as in give a groan, and what she calls a vague action verb (VAV), as in give a speech. The main difference between these two types of light verb usages is that the complement of a TLV is claimed to be headed by a verb. Wierzbicka (1982) argues that although the complement in such constructions might appear to be a zero-derived nominal, its syntactic category when used in an LVC is actually a verb, as indicated by the properties of such TLV constructions. For example, Kearns (2002) shows that, in contrast to VAVs, the complement of a TLV usually cannot be definite (3), nor can it be the surface subject of a passive  construction (4) or a fronted wh-element (5).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> (3) a. Jan gave the speech just now.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> b. * Jan gave the groan just now.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> (4) a. A speech was given by Jan.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> b. * A groan was given by Jan.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> (5) a. Which speech did Jan give?  b. * Which groan did Jan give? Because of their interesting and distinctive properties, we have restricted our initial investigation to light verb constructions with TLVs, i.e. &amp;quot;LV a V&amp;quot; constructions, as in give a groan. For simplicity, we will continue to refer to them here generally as LVCs. The meaning of an LVC of this type is almost equivalent to the meaning of the verbal complement (cf. (1) and (2) in Section 1). However, the light verb does contribute to the meaning of the construction, as can be seen by the fact that there are constraints on which light verb can occur with which complement (Wierzbicka, 1982). For example, one can give a cry but not *take a cry. The acceptability depends on semantic properties of the complement, and, as we explore below, may generalize in consistent ways across semantically similar (complement) verbs, as in give a cry, give a moan, give a howl; *take a cry, *take a moan, *take a howl.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> Many interesting questions pertaining to the syntactic and semantic properties of LVCs have been examined in the linguistic literature: How does the semantics of an LVC relate to the semantics of its parts? How does the type of the complement affect the meaning of an LVC? Why do certain light verbs select for certain complements? What underlies the (semi-)productivity of the creation of LVCs? Given the crosslinguistic frequency of LVCs, work on computational lexicons will depend heavily on the answers to these questions. We also believe that computational investigation can help to precisely answer the questions as well, by using statistical corpus-based analysis to explore the range and properties of these constructions. While details of the underlying semantic representation of LVCs are beyond the scope of this paper, we address the questions of their semi-productivity.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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