Light verb
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In linguistics, a light verb is a verb participating in complex predication (a V+V compound) that has little semantic content of its own, but provides some details on the event semantics, usually aspect or temporal information. The semantics of the compound, as well as its argument structure, are determined by the head or primary verb. English does not have many compound verbs, but we may consider take in take a nap, where the primary sense is provided by "nap", and "take" is the light verb. Other examples include the Yiddish geb in geb a helf (literally give a help, "help"), and French faire in faire semblant (lit. make seeming, "pretend") or Hindi nikal paRA (lit. leave fall, "start to leave"). Some verbs are found in many such expressions; to reuse an earlier example, take is found in take a nap, take a shower, take a sip, take a bow, take turns, and so on. Light verbs are extremely common in Indo-Iranian languages, Japanese, etc, in which verb compounding is a primary mechanism for marking aspectual distinctions.
Light verbs are interesting to linguists from a variety of perspectives, including those of diachronic linguistics, compositionality, and computational linguistics. From the diachronic perspective, light verbs are said to have evolved from the heavy verb through semantic bleaching, a process in which it loses some or all of its original semantics. In this sense, it is often viewed as part of a cline:
- verb (heavy) → light verb → auxiliary → clitic → affix
In computational linguistics, a serious challenge is that of identifying compound verbs, which require marking light verbs.
