When Lightness meets Lexical Aspect. A corpus-based account of English Light Verb Extensions

Since Jespersen’s definition of the concept (1942: 117–118), studies on Lightness have profusely developed in many languages. Recent contributions have focused on the hypothesis that Lightness is not uniquely a property of general verbs or Verb+Noun constructions, but that there are different instances of Light Verb patterns exhibiting different degrees of cohesion between the elements involved. In other words, various verbs can become ‘light’ in specific syntagmatic environments implying an eventive or deverbal nominal element. This suggests the existence of a gradient of lightness, which implies other constructions than the ones officially recognized by the previous literature on the topic. In keeping with this approach, this paper focuses on Light Verb Extensions. Like prototypical Light Verb Constructions, they stem from the combination of a verb and an eventive or deverbal noun; unlike prototypical Light Verb Constructions, they exploit fully lexical verbs that, under certain syntagmatic conditions, are turned into aspectual devices (e.g., to cultivate a virtue, to embrace a concept, to deliver a speech). This contribution presents a corpus-based account of such constructions in English, recognizing different aspectual configurations conveyed by the Light Verb Extension patterns, in which the predicate, devoid of its literal meaning, plays a crucial role in determining them. According to these findings, the criteria used so far to identify Lightness should include the aspectual dimension of the construction, thus confirming the idea that this phenomenon should be dealt with in a broader perspective.